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Mosul: Iraqi troops find Assyrian treasures in network of Isis tunnels
“So far we have only seen poor quality photographs – but they are extremely exciting,” said Sebastien Rey, lead archaeologist at the Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Programme at the British Museum. “I met Saleh at the Unesco conference in Paris 10 days ago, and was able to discuss it with him and look at his photographs, and there is no doubt that they have found something of great significance.
“The reliefs are unique, they have features which we have not seen anywhere else – they are not at all like the well-known Assyrian hunting and banqueting scenes such as we have in the museum.
“We also have reports – but as yet no photographs – that they have found two lamassu, the famous winged bull figures, which would suggest that they may have been flanking the entrance to a palace, with some form of temple as an annex.
“The archaeologists are incredibly brave. They are working in extreme danger, with the mudbrick in danger of collapse at any time. When it is safe to mount a full rescue excavation this will be a major operation, needing a great deal of resources which will certainly mean international support.”
Rey is particularly excited by his colleague’s reports of inscriptions in the stone: the Assyrian rulers, very usefully to archaeologists, were fond of elaborate and boastful inscriptions that included their names, dates and achievements.
It was known that there were layers of earlier history under the Nabi Yunus mosque, but it had never been fully excavated.
If the tentative dating of the carvings proves correct, they date from the final period of the once vast Assyrian empire, splintering under external attack and internal power struggles after centuries in which it dominated Mesopotamia and the great city of Nineveh was the largest in the world.
Magnificent carved panels and the gigantic winged bulls, from the palaces and temples of the emperor Sennacherib, are in museums across the world, including the British Museum.
According to AFP, Layla Salih, head of the antiquities service for the region, reported that more than 100 pieces of pottery in good condition, believed looted from the tunnels by Isis, have been recovered from a house in Mosul, and many more portable objects are assumed to have been taken.
The Unesco conference in Paris in February was told by the deputy Iraqi culture minister, Qais Rashid, that in the Mosul region alone at least 66 archaeological sites had been destroyed by Isis, some of them converted into car parks. He said that Muslim and Christian places of worship had suffered “massive destruction”, and thousands of manuscripts had been looted.
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