"Nimrod" flower vase

Following the excavation of Assyrian palaces in the mid-nineteenth century, ancient Mesopotamian imagery began to be used in European decorative arts, including jewelry and ceramics. Publicity in the form of news coverage and popular books around the excavations, removal of many sculptures from sites in northern Iraq to England and France, and public spectacles such as the reconstructed ‘Nineveh Court’ in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, London, fostered a fascination with Assyria and Assyrian art among the Victorian public.

The sculpture is part of a series designed by Aaron Hays, a sculptor who worked at the British Museum, for sale both as decorative objects and as tools for teaching and study of the ancient sculptures. They are made in Parian ware, a ceramic recently developed at the Copeland factory that could be poured into molds to form complex shapes and whose pale finish was intended to evoke the Parian marble used in ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. This was not the gypsum alabaster of which the Assyrian sculptures themselves were made but was clearly suited to Victorian decorative tastes. This example is a small vase modeled on the head of a winged bull, or lamassu, that once stood as a guardian figure at a gateway in an Assyrian palace at Khorsabad, ancient Dur-Sharrukin. The mid-nineteenth century sculptors knew that this was not literally a representation of the biblical king Nimrod, who appears in the Book of Genesis and is often interpreted as the builder of the Tower of Babel, but for the Victorian public it was the biblical connections of the Assyrian sculptures that made them so significant. In Iraq, the name of Nimrod is still connected with multiple ancient sites, including the Assyrian city of Nimrud, ancient Kalhu, that was the main focus of early British excavations.