ARCHAEOLOGISTS DIDN’T KNOW what to expect when they began searching for a 2,700-year-old Assyrian sculpture that had last been seen decades before. First documented in the nineteenth century and excavated in the early 1990s, the massive statue was subsequently reburied to protect it from turmoil in northern Iraq that threatened the site. By 2023, the political situation in the region had stabilized, allowing archaeologists to return. As an Iraqi-French team removed 30 feet of debris, the figure’s fine details gradually reemerged. There were rows of delicately overlapping feathers, the hanging curls of a man’s beard, and the cloven hooves of a bull, all skillfully carved from shining white alabaster. The sculpture, which stood 12.5 feet tall and weighed nearly 20 tons, represented a lamassu, an Assyrian deity with a human head and a winged bull’s body. Given the intense events that had occurred around the site, it was a marvel that the sculpture remained in such good condition. “The lamassu had vanished between anti-tank trenches and bunkers,” says Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University archaeologist Pascal Butterlin. “Considering this situation, with traces of heavy bombing and fights all around, it’s a miracle that it wasn’t further damaged.” Only the statue’s head was missing, but Iraqi officials knew it had been surreptitiously looted in 1995 and broken into parts to be smuggled out of the country. The pieces of the lamassu’s head were successfully retrieved and are currently exhibited in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad.
The lamassu once stood as a protective guardian at a gate into the ancient city of Dur-Sharrukin, near modern Khorsabad. Dur-Sharrukin was intended to be the greatest city of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which, in the late eighth century B.C., became the largest the world had known. The city was built by Sargon II (reigned 721–705 B.C.)—the name Dur-Sharrukin means “fortress of Sargon”—to be the new capital of his flourishing kingdom. The king constructed lavish palaces, ornate temples, and mighty defensive walls. His splendid city, however, was short-lived. In 705 B.C., just a decade after he founded Dur-Sharrukin, while thecity was still being built, Sargon died on the battlefield. His son Sennacherib (reigned 704–681 B.C.) inherited the throne and soon abandoned his father’s project.
