One of the greatest surviving Assyrian reliefs has been off show at the British Museum for most of the past 18 years. The Banquet Scene (around 645-635BC) remains in store because there is no suitable place to display it. Astonishingly, no UK institution has ever asked to borrow this masterpiece from antiquity.
The Turkish army targeted Mîska, an Assyrian village, during its bombardment of the Metîna region. The Christian church in the village was also hit in the attack. The Turkish army has been intensively bombing the Medya Defense Zones and especially the Metina region in southern Kurdistan (northern Iraq) in the past weeks.
On June 16-26, participants in the fifth meeting of the Commission for Dialogue between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Assyrian Church of the East visited monasteries, churches and historical and cultural sights in the Metropolias of Mordovia and Nizhny Novgorod, as well as in Moscow.
(AFP) -- Switzerland on Friday returned to Iraq three important Mesopotamian objects seized during a criminal procedure, Bern said. During a ceremony at the culture ministry in Bern, Swiss Interior Minister Elisabeth Baume-Schneider handed over a partial statue and two Mesopotamian reliefs to Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein.
My relatives fled Mosul to save their lives before ISIS invaded and seized power in the summer of 2014. The invasion of Iraq's second largest city not only uprooted my relatives, Indigenous Assyrians, but it also led to the genocide of Assyrians/Chaldeans/Syriacs (Christians), as well as Shiite Muslims, and Yazidis.
Archaeologists didn't know what to expect when they began searching for a 2,700-year-old Assyrian sculpture that had last been seen decades before. First documented in the nineteenth century and excavated in the early 1990s, the massive statue was subsequently reburied to protect it from turmoil in northern Iraq that threatened the site.