Why Ancient Assyrian Bulls Have Five Legs

Nobody complained about the extra leg for 2,800 years. Assyrian sculptors gave their palace guardians five legs, and it is one of the smartest tricks in ancient art. But the way these giants ended up in museums is even stranger: a buried empire, a ten-ton tug of war, a river full of pirates, and two bulls that may still be lying in the mud of the Tigris. This video is the story of the lamassu, the human-headed winged bulls that guarded the palaces of Nimrud and Khorsabad. We look at why the sculptors carved a fifth leg, what the horned cap, the beard and the writing between the legs meant, and how Paul-Émile Botta and Austen Henry Layard dug them out of the ground. We follow the giants down the Tigris on rafts, into the 1855 disaster at Al-Qurnah, then to a forty-ton bull built into the wall of a museum in Chicago, and finally to the guardians destroyed in 2015 and the people rebuilding them. This is a story about art, engineering, archaeology, and what it takes to keep an ancient guardian standing. TIMESTAMPS 0:00 - The Sculptor's Problem 0:52 - What A Lamassu Actually Is 1:57 - The Secret Of The Fifth Leg 3:11 - Horns, Beards And A King's Résumé 4:23 - A Lost Empire Found Again 5:45 - How Do You Move Ten Tons? 7:10 - The River Takes Them Back 8:21 - The Bull Built Into A Museum 9:23 - Destroyed And Rebuilt 10:38 - Conclusion: The Bull With Five Legs SOURCES Layard, Austen Henry. Nineveh and Its Remains. John Murray, 1849. Botta, Paul-Émile, and Eugène Flandin. Monument de Ninive. Imprimerie nationale, 1849–1850. Place, Victor. Ninive et l'Assyrie. Imprimerie impériale, 1867–1870. Fergusson, James. The Palaces of Nineveh and Persepolis Restored. John Murray, 1851. Collection records and object notes: The British Museum; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Musée du Louvre; Oriental Institute Museum, University of Chicago; Iraq Museum. Factum Foundation, on the Mosul facsimiles of the Nimrud guardians. IMAGE CREDITS Artworks, engravings, maps and photographs are in the public domain or openly licensed. The full per-image list is in the pinned comment. AKS.9955 (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Alemazzi (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Fredarch (CC BY-SA 3.0) · G.Garitan (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Mark from Brighton (CC BY 2.0) · Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Photonashwan (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Sanjar Alimov (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Tischusi71 (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Txllxt (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Unknown photographer (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Vania Teofilo (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0) · Zunkir (CC BY-SA 4.0) · rosemanios (CC BY 2.0) Also used under CC0 or public domain: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rijksmuseum, Daderot, Gary Todd, Shonagon, New York Public Library, Internet Archive Book Images, Wellcome Collection, and Natural Earth (map data).