Bracelet with Assyrian-inspired design

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.

This hinged bracelet features a design based on reliefs showing royal lion hunts. The king, in a high crown, hunts from a chariot, using a bow and arrow or, as here, a spear. The scene is not a very close copy of any one relief, but the best parallels for the king using a spear and accompanied in the chariot by an attendant holding a bow as well as the driver are those of Ashurbanipal (r. 669–631 BCE) from Nineveh, which are also the most extensive and detailed of the lion-hunt scenes. The hunts are a major subject in the palace reliefs and clearly had a religious aspect: following the hunt the king is shown pouring libations in a ritual over the bodies of the lions. The deaths of lions could be represented very graphically, something reflected in the more stylized but still vivid images of lions being killed on the bracelet. The palm trees that form the backdrop come from other sets of reliefs at Nineveh, showing military campaigns in Babylonia, modern southern Iraq.