The Metropolitan Museum of Art could just as well be called the Metropolitan Museum of Artifacts. It has enormously good collections of artifacts from the Ancient Near East and elsewhere, and in the next few blog posts we will be showing you some of what they have, starting with the Assyrian stuff. Careful students of the Bible will remember that it was the Assyrians who swept across the fertile crescent and conquered the northern tribes of Israel, carting off some of its leaders, in about 722 B.C. The Assyrians were known even in antiquity as one of the fiercest groups of ancient peoples, and one of their famous rulers, Asshurbanipal once swore he would “wash his swords in the Mediterranean” hacking his way through one people group after another, including the Israelites. Here below you will find some artifacts from Asshur, one of the major cities of the Assyrian (today located in norther Iraq). See the maps below.
We will have more images from the arifacts pilfered from Ashurnasipal’s palace in the next post.
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