Gypsum wall relief panels of a a campaign in in modern southern Iraq. The enemy, Chaldaean or Aramaean tribesmen live in marshlands and use boats made from bundles of reeds. some of them hide or escape but most of them are captured and driven off to the right with their cattle to be counted by the clerks and inspected by the Assyrian king. A fragment also shows prisoners in a palm groove. A panel shows prisoners are marched through date-palms accompanied by their families and possessions. One soldiers who has brought several enemy heads is rewarded with a bracelet. In another panel, the Assyrian soldiers pile up booty: cauldrons, weapons, and furniture including a table with a crenelated top. Clerks take notes while soldiers of the bodyguards look on. Above, soldiers are slaughtering an animal and cooking joints of meat on an open fire. Neo-assyrian era, 640-620 BC. From Nineveh, South-West palace, Mesopotamia, Northern Iraq. The British Museum.

For the first time since before the 1991 Gulf War, Western scholars have been able to marvel first-hand at a spectacular array of 2,800-year-old gold treasures from northern Iraq.