What is the difference between an Assyrian and an asexual? That's the question doctor-turned-comedian Jenan Younis was confronting after one of her gigs. "I had spoken about being Assyrian and after the show this old lady came up to me and said, oh so you're a Syrian," she recalls. "I said 'no, I am Assyrian'.
The harvest season is now! Send silver so we can store barley for you before your arrival. The beer bread I made for you has become too old. This is urgent! When you read this letter, come, look to Assur, your god, and your home hearth, and let me see you in person while I am still alive! Misery has entered our minds. A wife expresses familiar concerns to her husband.
Technology evolves with breakneck speed, and it is not too often that one can say he or she relies on something that has gone largely unchanged for centuries. But each time you reach for an umbrella, you're relying on an invention that's more than 4,000 years old. Evidence suggests umbrellas originated in ancient Egypt and nearby Assyria.
Assyria. Babylonia. Persia. These ancient empires covered an area generally consisting of modern-day Iraq and Iran. Museum goers can learn more about these cultures through exhibitions of their artistic expressions across North America. When Western audiences imagine artwork from this region, carpets often first come to mind.
In a bas relief, Ashurbanipal is depicted as a great slayer of lions. The 2,700-year-old sculpt shows him fending off the kings of the jungle with bow and arrow, in a chariot, and on horseback. One panel, showing the lions' planned release, says otherwise.
(BBC) -- If you want big answers, start small. Take, for example, the sprawling sculpted slabs of ancient alabaster known as the Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal. At first glance, the 7th-Century BC gypsum panels, which once adorned the walls of a royal palace in Nineveh, Upper Mesopotamia, are a confusing chaos of arrows splitting muscle.