Ancient Gold (a little, anyway)

This time on Artifactually Speaking, I take a look at -- Gold!

Of course, gold is not the object of our search at all, but in royal contexts like here on the citadel of Nimrud/Kalhu, it does show up. Most of it was looted long ago, especially in the destruction of the city around 612 BCE. But small pieces like this sometimes missed the hands of ancient looters and show us that the ancient kings who built these places weren't lying when they said they built their temples with all sorts of luxury goods, including gold, silver, and lapis.

In this case we have only a small bit of sheet gold that must have originally covered something near the entrance to the shrine of Ninurta. It's not an overly impressive piece, but it does tell us something. For example, it has a narrow curvature that might show it originally was wrapped around a pole of some sort, possibly bearing a banner that indicated the door to Ninurta's shrine off of the courtyard. We know this opening was highly decorated. Not only do we have the decorative bricks fallen here, but Layard also found two enormous stone lion lamassu here in 1849. Those lamassu were moved to the Mosul Museum in 1973 and unfortunately, were then destroyed by ISIS/DAESH in 2015.