Nimrud: Northwest Palace of Assurnasirpal II

The Iraq Heritage Stabilization Program and Penn Museum began work at Nimrud in 2022. There were several main goals, chief among them to help the Iraqis rebuild after the ISIS destructions of 2015/2016. Of course, another goal was to learn more about the Neo Assyrian people who originally built the site and lived in it.

I joined early in 2023 and worked mainly in the Ishtar Temple. But I took a lot of video footage around the site, especially in association with making the initial maps of the citadel and especially the areas where we were working. In this video, I visit the Northwest Palace and talk about its history.

This large palace was excavated in the 19th and 20th centuries by many different archaeologists, then reconstructed in the 1950s-1970s as a tourist site. In 2015, however, ISIS planted barrel bombs and destroyed it. For an interesting virtual version of the reconstructed palace, see this Metropolitan Museum video:    • Digital Reconstruction of the Northwest Pa...  

The Smithsonian Institute has been locating the fragments of the original relief sculptures that were still in the palace when it was destroyed (both originals and copies were present in the reconstruction). They have covered them in place and mapped their locations, with the eventual plan of reconstructing as many of the destroyed reliefs as possible.

In mid-2023 the Iraq State Board of Antiquities and Heritage began intense cleanup of the NW Palace in preparation for rebuilding, but when I made this video it was largely in the same state it was after the explosion. After cleanup is completed, we will help them with plans for rebuilding the palace as a place to visit once more.