Nimrud in the British Museum
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- Опубликовано: 26 июл 2024
- On my way to excavate at Nimrud in the Spring of 2023 I stopped in the British Museum. Many British archaeologists have worked at Nimrud over the past 200 years, including Austen Henry Layard (1840s), William Kennett Loftus (1850s), and Max Mallowan (1950s). Some of the objects they excavated are stored in the British Museum and there's an entire gallery of stone reliefs from the site on display.
I wanted to refresh my memory on Neo-Assyrian representational styles and see some of these large monuments. And as I went, I recorded a bit of my observations and ramblings. I was not there on official business and this video is not sponsored or endorsed by the British Museum. Any mistakes I make or opinions I give are my own.
Some conspiracy theorists have suggested that the Assyrians had some sort of alien guidance in making such impressive objects. Did they have anti-gravity technology, military tanks, and diving gear? I'll show a few images that have been (rarely and with no evidence) interpreted that way. The obvious answer, however, is no. As science fiction ideas, however, they're fun and I'd like to write a short story that has the Neo-Assyrians utilizing some of these technologies. If you haven't read any of my sci-fi stories (most not related to the ancient world in any way) you could do worse than start with a futuristic one I wrote ten years ago that was turned into an audio version and recapped in 2020 on Escape Pod:
escapepod.org/2020/06/12/esca...
Enjoy!
timestamps for video chapters:
00:00 intro
00:39 stelae (monuments)
01:17 apkallu reliefs
03:32 warfare reliefs
05:08 river crossing
05:47 lion statues
06:53 outro 
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Thank you so much! Thanks for fighting the alien conspiracy theories!
Fantastic video! The Nimrud lion set is one of my favorite pieces of ancient Near Eastern sculpture/architecture and they even featured heavily in my undergraduate dissertation (written on heritage damage in Iraq).
Really makes me sad so much of Mesopotamia was dug up in the 19th century. Imagine all the important sruff they trashed
ooh thank youu!!! I only went there for one day.. Not enough time😅 I am sooo looking forward for your next video ❤
I had no idea there was paint remnants in some of these. That makes me wonder, do we know what they would've looked like fully painted? Are there any paint remnants anywhere else to try and do a color reconstruction like they did with Roman marble statues?
There are some paint remnants, though some are now microscopic. And some reconstructions have been attempted. The Metropolitan Museum of Art did an interesting virtual reconstruction of the NW palace at Nimrud and put a video walkthrough on RUclips. At 1:36 in the video they show a reconstruction of a painted apkallu relief:
ruclips.net/video/5VCldg1TdHc/видео.html
nice to see you back. ( big smiley face)
Always enjoy your videos! Hope to see much more from your dig!
as the bag looks about the size of the soldier's torso (40, 50 liters maybe?) the CO2 wouldn't be that bothering for a few minutes... you breathe out a lot of O2 too and there is a safe concentration before CO2 makes you dizzy. It's by far not a true aqualung, but it would work. For a short while.
Does not change the buoyancy problem. That large a bag would take half the weight of a grown man... in addition to natural buoyancy
I wonder, if reliefs were colored, those long horizontal inscriptions were made before of after painting?
If before, those script would be smoothed out by paint and flaking out paint later.
Too much chance of damage to the rest of the paint if they were done after, I think. From my own experience of home decoration.
@@pattheplanter That's exactly what puzzles me. Both ways, before and after, have their minuses. Would be interesting to know how it really was.
It's a really interesting question and I don't have a direct answer. I don't know if there are paint remnants in the cuneiform wedges but I don't think so. If they painted after the inscription then you would think the signs would be filled with paint. But maybe they left a strip unpainted where the signs would go? Or, as you say, maybe they cleaned out each character after painting; or painted around them?
@@artifactuallyspeaking or painted them in a different colours. Maybe one day we will know.
Seeing all the stelae covered in cuniform relief writing makes me curious on how we know it is the first language. Is it assumed that charcoal writing came first? I can't imagine the first medium a writer picked up was an unfired brick of clay.
There were cave paintings long before 'writing' as we think of it, and those probably told a story. But they weren't written language in a systematic way that we use to define scripts. They did record numbers, though--counts of things like moon cycles.
In Mesopotamia we can track the development of writing, and damp clay does seem to be the first medium used. They painted on pots before, but none of those symbols replicated a direct system of speech. The symbols on seals that were pressed into clay to demonstrate ownership, plus the clay tokens that were used to count things, become rather systematic and seem to be the precursors of actual writing in Mesopotamia.
What is the handbag for? I don't believe it was aliens anything, nor Crystal powered spaceships bulshit. But the handbag does show up in different cultures carvings. I would really honestly like to know what the handbag is 4 from each culture?
They likely represent different objects in different cultures. It's hard to depict a 3D object in 2D and the handled objects could be bags, buckets, or baskets in use for different things. In Assyria we find copper buckets that have handles that are likely the physical representation of the object in the Assyrian reliefs. In the depictions, they are usually shown held by a mythological being that holds a cone in the other hand. We believe it shows a ritual where the being (or perhaps a priest dressed like this in an enacted version if done in real life) dipped the cone into a liquid in the bucket (blessed water?) and then sprinkled it on the king or person to be protected.
We also find solid stone objects with 'handles' that are weights. They are carved in one piece and the handle portion would have had a rope tied to it to anchor something like a tent. These are not the objects represented in the reliefs, since we can see in the relief that the handle hooks into the loops of the bucket, but if they were represented in a 2D relief, they would look like the 'handbag'. I use this as an example of different objects that might look the same but are vastly different in use.
I don't know what the representations in other cultures are meant to show, but most cultures had buckets, bags, or baskets to carry or hold things. And we need more than a single somewhat similar looking icon to establish a definite connection between cultures.
"Alien dissemination of handbag idea" is probably the most conspiracy theory thing one could come up with. Why would humans across the globe need alien help to invent a bag or any other device to hold carry things around 😄
I mean, it's very old stuff now. In the 60s there was already books around with same/similar theories of an G. Handhock and cohorte. I remember, my father had some books of this kind. So nothing new,. And exactly what comes up with most "urban legends" (let's call them so).
While i can understand that it may seem very surprising, especially put side by side, what is often done in these books, people should slightly know it better after all the years.
But dramas, mysteries, and conspiration theories selll so much better. 🙃
Humans are amazing animals! Just look at what we can do with basic tools. I love Mesopotamia ❤
The British museum, one of the largest crime scenes in the world.
About excavated artifacts now being kept in Iraq: yeah, that turned out for the worse. Giving Hong Kong back to China didn't either... Can't really cancel colonialism and its consequences especially whete there's some batshit insane empire cosplayer faction nearby.
Don't waste my time by mentioning stupid aliens, even in jest 👎 unsubscribed.
I mean dang bro chill
You seem like a cool and reasonable person.