Sacred Tree

About this Brooklyn Icon
The Brooklyn Museum is commemorating its 200th anniversary by spotlighting 200 standout objects in its encyclopedic collection.

Walking through the palace of the Neo-Assyrian king Ashur-nasir-pal II, you would have encountered giant gypsum alabaster reliefs. These 12 examples once decorated various rooms in his palace, which is located in Nimrud, Iraq, ancient Kalhu. Ashur-nasir-pal’s palace was the first to feature these types of monumental stone reliefs. They replaced frescoes, which were a less permanent, and less striking, form of decoration.

The reliefs were meant to awe. Their size, colors, and godly imagery created a sensorial experience designed to elevate the king and intimidate the viewer. Small cuneiform texts detail Ashur-nasir-pal’s names, titles, and military campaigns. The texts run through depictions of the king holding bowls of libations, the bodies of winged genies sprinkling water, and sacred trees. Although no longer visible, some areas of the stone were painted, and traces of ancient pigments have been identified through scientific testing.

Henry Layard excavated Ashur-nasir-pal’s palace in the 1840s, when Iraq was under the governance of the Ottoman Empire. The reliefs came to Boston in 1858 and were eventually bought by James Lenox for the New York Historical Society. In 1955, Hagop Kevorkian and the Kevorkian Foundation purchased the reliefs for the Brooklyn Museum. In the 2000s, they were analyzed, conserved, and installed in their current space.

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Gallery Label

Assyrian palaces were decorated to overwhelm the ancient visitor with the king’s power and to reveal the supernatural world where the king existed. The reliefs in this gallery decorated the vast palace of Ashur-nasir-pal II (883–859 B.C.E.), one of the greatest rulers of ancient Assyria. Completed in 879 B.C.E. at Kalhu (modern Nimrud, slightly north of Baghdad, Iraq), they were carved with majestic images of kings, divinities, sacred trees, magical beings called apkallu, and inscriptions. Apkallu had human bodies with wings and either human, eagle, or fish heads. The Assyrians believed that apkallu survived a mythical flood to serve the king.

King Ashur-nasir-pal II celebrated the completion of his palace at Kalhu with a gala banquet. The festivities lasted ten days and drew, according to another text called The Banquet Stele, 69,574 guests who wandered through the palace and its more than two acres of grounds. Guests marveled at the walls decorated with massive alabaster slabs, including the twelve displayed here. The glory, however, was short lived. Within a few generations the palace had been abandoned, and eventually it was forgotten.

A generous grant from Bank of America in 2018 and 2019 funded the Brooklyn Museum Conservation department’s documentation, cleaning, and remounting of the six reliefs not previously treated during an earlier 2001 conservation campaign.

The Kevorkian Gallery has been renovated with two sloped floors designed to improve wheelchair access with funding from the State of New York in 2009.

The Assyrian palace reliefs were purchased for the Brooklyn Museum with funds from Hagop Kevorkian and the Kevorkian Foundation in 1955.

Who Were the Assyrians?

The Assyrians, an ethnic group that originated in modern-day northern Iraq, ruled a wide empire stretching from Iran to Egypt in the years 911 to 609 B.C.E. They introduced iron weapons to the region, which gave them a military advantage that enabled the Assyrians to conquer what became the largest multi-ethnic empire in history up until that time.

Because the Assyrians occupied part of the land that is present-day Israel, they are often mentioned in the Bible. At the time, there were two separate kingdoms: Israel and Judah. The Assyrians, led by Sargon II (reigned about 721–705 B.C.E.), conquered, destroyed, and scattered the people of the Kingdom of Israel. His successor, Sennacherib (reigned about 704–681 B.C.E.), laid siege to Jerusalem, capital of the Kingdom of Judah, but failed to capture it.

The end of the empire came suddenly. The Medes, an ethnic group from modern Iran, recruited the help of the Babylonians, who originated in the south of present-day Iraq, to battle the Assyrians. Together they brought the 300-year-old empire to an end. The Kingdom of Judah fell about twenty-five years later to the Babylonians.

How the Reliefs Came to Brooklyn

From their ancient Assyrian creators, to modern Western purchasers, to Islamic State attackers, control of Assyrian palace reliefs is always a bid for power, prestige, and cultural heritage.

In 1840 Austen Henry Layard, an English diplomat who was rafting down the Tigris River, noticed the mound that covered these reliefs. He stopped to examine it, and then vowed to return and excavate the site. Five years later, the Ottoman sultan, a Muslim with little interest in ancient polytheistic remains, granted Layard permission to dig. With the financial support of the British Museum, he sent so many reliefs back to London that ultimately the British Museum sold those it could not display.

Americans also wished to participate in the prestige associated with owning a piece of ancient history. Henry Stevens, an American living in London, purchased these twelve reliefs in 1855. He sold them to James Lenox, who bought them for the New-York Historical Society in Manhattan. In 1937 the Society loaned them to the Brooklyn Museum. Finally, in 1955, Hagop Kevorkian, a collector and dealer in ancient Near Eastern art in New York, donated the funds to the Museum to purchase the reliefs. Events in modern-day Iraq complicate how we talk about the removal of these reliefs from the site. Though generally there are those who argue that cultural heritage materials should not be transported away from their place of origin, the early removal of the Assyrian palace reliefs to museums in England and the United States has preserved them. In 2015 the Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL, or DA’ESH) destroyed the archaeological site and remaining palace reliefs at Nimrud. Though Iraqi forces reconquered the area in 2016, ongoing instability in the area continues to threaten the many archaeological sites that remain. The Brooklyn Museum takes pride in preserving these antiquities for future generations of visitors.