Art and Empire: Treasures from Assyria opened September 21st in the Gund Gallery of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. My museum membership includes tickets to these so-called blockbuster exhibitions, albeit on a timed admission schedule, so I took advantage of this benefit and entered the show around noon today.

As we learned in Sunday School, the Assyrians emerged from their homeland in northern Iraq and built a world-class empire between the ninth and seventh centuries B.C.E. Then as happens so frequently, their fortunes shifted and their storied cities were covered over with sand. In the 1840s and 1850s teams of French and British archaeologists uncovered their ancient palaces, revealing the glories of Ninevah and Nimrud. Most of these archaeological finds were divided between England and Iraq, and, as a result, the British Museum today holds the largest collection of Assyrian art outside of Iraq itself. I for one am glad that the MFA accepted the British Museum’s invitation to collaborate on this exhibit.

And a fabulous show it is. Go and see for yourself! It will take your breath away. Like everyone else, I loved the reliefs. We could get up close and personal to these enormous four thousand-year-old stone slabs, without guards yelling or those annoyingly surreptitious electric-eye barriers beeping out alarms. I marveled at the intricately carved figures and the narratives of war and conquest they told. Some would see these artifacts as symbols of the vanity of human striving, but I think there’s more to it. This empire vanished, but their art and literature endured. We know the names of the rulers; we know how they dressed, what they ate, how they perceived the world and their place in it. As the MFA website says:

Military dress and equipment and horse trappings and harnesses illustrate life in the army. Carved ivories, furniture fittings, and metal vessels showcase the luxurious, cosmopolitan lifestyle enjoyed by the king and his court. An array of three-dimensional objects—figures of deities, clay tablets, clay seals and sealings—address the administration of the empire, trade, legal and social issues, and interrelationships between religion, magic, and medicine. Exorcisms, omen texts, mathematical texts, and literary compositions from the royal library . . .enshrine the wisdom of ancient Mesopotamia, the cradle of western civilization.

The quotation in my title is from an inscription of Tiglath Pileser I, circa1150 B.C.E, considered the founder of the first Assyrian empire and a total bad-ass dude. The translation of the Akkadian language, written in cuneiform, is by Sir Henry Rawlinson et al.