During the 19th and early 20th centuries, Europeans excavated sites all over the world and took the discoveries back to their own countries. This large monumental stone slab shows an Assyrian deity and an inscription written in wedge-shaped writing called Cuneiform, in honour of King Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 BC) of Assyria. The museum received the slab from the relatives of a man who claimed to have got it when Sir Austen Henry Layard and Henry Rowlinson, both pioneers of the study of Middle Eastern archaeology, were working in Iraq. It is one of a number of such slabs from the walls of the King's palace.
