The Assyrian Sculptures from the Nergal Gate Museum at Nineveh before the Islamic State's Attack.

• Author: Brusasco, Paolo
• Position: Report

THE NERGAL GATE MUSEUM

The brutal attack on the Mosul Cultural Museum shown in the Islamic State's video of February 26, 2015 targeted one of the most important cultural institutions of Iraq, the second largest museum in the country after the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, and sparked a new wave of cultural cleansing. In the wake of this destruction, Near Eastern archaeologists and scholars have centered their concerns on the inventory of the objects on exhibition in the museum, trying to establish their exact number and the presence of plaster copies which in some instances replaced those precious items evacuated to Baghdad before the Second Gulf War. (1) Unfortunately, it turned out that the vast majority were original pieces, but no one has so far questioned the provenance of the artifacts shown in the video, assuming that all originated from the Mosul Cultural Museum. (2)

However, if the IS video of February 26, 2015 features items from the Nergal Gate (3) Museum at Nineveh, this would show that already before that date the terrorist group had been tampering with the archaeological site, either destroying or looting it, much earlier than previously thought. (4) However, direct material evidence of site destruction became available only much later, in spring 2016. As suggested by ASOR Cultural Heritage Initiatives (CHI), "[a]n updated DigitalGlobe satellite image from June 16, 2016 shows that the entire Nergal Gate has been destroyed and the ground where it stood has been levelled. The debris from the destruction has been removed." (5)

Before IS attacks against the site were carried out in early February 2015 and April 2016, like most museums at main archaeological sites built by Iraq's Department of Antiquities during the 1960s and refurbished in Saddam Hussein's time, the Nergal Gate Museum was a small two-roomed structure. It was located inside the towered entrance of the reconstructed Nergal Gate, one of the main gateways in the northwest line of fortifications in Sennacherib's walled city (Fig. I). (6) Besides serving as a museum, the Gate was also reconstructed to protect the four colossal human-headed winged bull sculptures which guarded the entrances (al-Asil 1956: 3-9).

The history of the excavations of the Gate is very complex, since it was unearthed piecemeal over a long period of time. As shown by the schematic plan published in a study of the building by Reade (2016: 66, Fig. 17), there were three pairs of winged bulls--exposed by C. J. Rich (c. 1810), by Austen Henry Layard (1849), and by the Iraqi Directorate-General (1941), respectively. Owing to the presence of an outer entry opening onto a large courtyard, the gate is a "trapyard" structure. The real gate, with three passages crossing two rooms, opened off the courtyard on the opposite side of the outer entry.

While Rich probably discovered the pair of winged human-headed bulls that flanked the southern passage of the gate, Layard excavated a different new pair of winged bulls and genii with bucket and cone at its north end (Layard 1853a: 120-23). (7) They were "still entire, though cracked and injured by fire" noted Layard, who further describes these sculptures as "unfinished, none of the details having been put in, and parts being but roughly outlined" (1853a: 120). (8) Despite various depredations subsequent to their excavation, (9) R. Campbell Thompson remarked that "these fine monuments were still in existence in 1905, but have since been destroyed" (in Gadd 1936: 61). (10)

The third pair of winged bulls protecting the outer entry was not uncovered until April 1941, after a heavy rainstorm exposed the bull on its west side. However, while it was well preserved, only the lower half of the bull on the east side was extant. Some confusion arose, and these sculptures were mistakenly taken for the winged bulls Layard had uncovered in 1849 and thought to have been destroyed some time before. On the grounds that no genii were found when the gate was excavated in 1941, J. P. G. Finch disputed Layard's claim about the recovery of human-headed attendants behind the lamassu. (11) Finch's comparison of the well-preserved lamassu on the west side of the outer entry unearthed in the 1941 excavations with the drawing Layard's artist F. C. Cooper had made of the winged bull on the west side of the entry to the gate proper clarified that the winged bull excavated by Layard in 1849 was not the same colossus as exposed by the Iraqis in 1941. (12) However, this only reinforced his opinion that "Cooper, and with him Layard, had got so far off the track as to be attributing the drawing to the wrong bull" (Finch 1948: 16). Finch was wrong, since we have now established the presence of three pairs of lamassu, with evidence for the winged genii that Layard and Cooper reported.

A project of excavation and restoration of the Nergal Gate (or Gate of Nergal of Tarbisu, Gate 10) was carried out by Iraqi archaeologists in the late 1960s, continuing into the 1990s, when Manhal Jabbar dug the so-called trapyard between the external entry and the gate proper. An archaeological park with its small museum was also constructed at the site (Figs. 2-3). Without available publications of their work it is difficult to detail the sequence of the operations carried out at the gate. However, at least two pairs of winged bulls had been incorporated into the restored Nergal Gate featured in the IS video. The two lamassu on the outside of the gate, facing the countryside, flank the restored building housing the Nergal Gate Museum, while the two unfinished, heavily cracked winged bulls and genii, facing north, are visible within the passage inside the gate proper, protected by a corrugated metal roof. (13) As for the additional figures flanking the passage leading from the gate into the city, according to Iraqi archaeologists from the University of Mosul, these sculptures were almost completely destroyed, with only the lowest half of the reliefs still standing. They may be tentatively identified with two fragmentary reliefs pictured in Suzanne Bott's photographs Nineveh & Nebi Yunus 2008 DS 46 and 52, taken during her visit in 2008.

As shown in the video of February 26, 2015 and in later IS footage from June 2016, all four lamassu were attacked by the Islamic State. On the outside, the face of the right lamassu was chiseled off with a power saw (Figs. 4-5). Likewise, the two lamassu inside the gate, less well preserved than the others, were targeted with sledgehammers and jackhammers. As evidenced in the video of June 7, 2016, they were finally bulldozed and their debris removed by dumptruck (Danti et al. 2016b: 55-56).

The purpose of the present discussion is to determine the contents of the Nergal Gate Museum at the time of the IS attack. Since most items (except the lamassu) appear intact in the video, they may have, at least in part, been sold on the illicit antiquities market sometime before the destruction of the lamassu. In fact, Qais Hussein Rashid, the head of Iraq's State Board for Antiquities and Heritage, has suggested that the IS demolition of artifacts in museums and on Assyrian sites could have been "a cover-up for looting operations" (Schemm 2015). (14) Therefore I have tried to create a tentative inventory of the Assyrian sculptures once held in the Nergal Gate Museum. This may be helpful to international institutions such as World Customs and Interpol concerned with the recovery of smuggled cultural property. Given the impossibility of accessing the Nergal Gate Museum's general catalogue, this preliminary analysis has drawn on several new sources. (15)

THE NEW PHOTOGRAPHIC DATABASE

Evidence of the items on display in the Nergal Gate Museum is provided by the photographic database "Nineveh & Nebi Yunis photos 2008," "Nimrud 2008-10," and "Nimrud Survey Photos Bott Oct 2008," posted on March 7, 2015 to the IraqCrisis Mailing List by Suzanne E. Bott. It must be stressed that, despite their "Nimrud" label, the latter two databases also contain four images originating from the Nergal Gate Museum. (16) In September 2015 I received additional images from Bott, and these photos make up the data set of the present analysis. In sum, there are sixteen useful images of the Nergal Gate, seven of which show the museum interior with the artifacts on display at the time of the IS attack. (17) Bott's photographs provide reliable evidence of the actual contents on site in 2010, (l8) and, as suggested by Bott, "[i]t is unlikely that much had changed since then" (Bott 2015a).

"Nineveh & Nebi Yunis 2008 DS 4, 5, 13, 18, 19" portray US soldiers walking toward the external entrance of the gate (Fig. 6). Two signs, in Arabic and in English, are affixed to the wall inside the entrance beside the doors that lead to the two rooms of the Museum (Figs. 5-7). (19) The signage briefly describes the historical importance of Nineveh and provides the size of the reconstructed gate: "It stands on a brick platform of 5 m from the ground level, the width is 16.50, the total height is 21.50 m, the facade is 20.70 m with the sided towers, while the door entrance is 7.80 m long." (20)

Bott's PDF "'Nineveh': 156th Survey & Design. Nineveh Nergal Gate and Sennacherib October 2008" reproduces the plan of the Nergal Gate with the museum (Fig. 9). This small exhibition area had a didactic value for tourists and was constructed inside the structure of the gate near the entranceway, namely within the two towers flanking the arched passageway on either side. For the sake of clarity, the rooms composing the museum are here given numbers 1 (east tower) and 2 (west tower) (Fig. 9). The PDF reports their size as 8.84 x 4.72 m (42 [m.sup.2]) each. The exhibits included pieces from Nineveh and other nearby Assyrian sites, as well as plaster replicas of architectural features and copies of items of particular value whose originals had been sent to the Iraq Museum in Baghdad or to the Mosul Cultural Museum...