Among the most striking and memorable exhibits in the British Museum are the Assyrian reliefs depicting the royal hunt. These huge panels show the king, Ashurbanipal, shooting, spearing and stabbing a succession of lions, albeit ones that had been trapped beforehand and released from cages for the occasion. It is a magnificent work of art, carved in the city of Nineveh – on the outskirts of modern-day Mosul in northern Iraq – around the middle of the 7th century BC.
My favourite section shows the king on horseback, riding full pelt, with no reins in his hands but only his bow and arrow. Our eyes are drawn to the detail of Ashurbanipal’s robe, the ringlets of his beard and hair, the expressions of horse and rider: the horse is champing urgently forward; the king, the very image of regal composure, stillness in motion, is calmly aiming his arrow, holding it in place with his thumb while stretching the bowstring with a delicately bent index finger. But Selena Wisnom would have us notice something else. Tucked into the king’s belt is a stylus. A telling detail. Here is a man who wants his literacy to be noticed. In any situation – in battle, in hunting – the king is ready to write.
For Ashurbanipal, literacy as much as might was a source of pride. Not just basic literacy, in fact, but prowess. In one inscription, on a clay tablet also in the British Museum, he boasts of being the equal of any of his scholars:
I have learned the craft of the sage Adapa, the secret hidden lore of all the scribal arts.
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