Layla Salih (born 1975) is an Iraqi archaeologist. As Head of the Nineveh Antiquities section in the Iraq State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, she has been responsible for the monitoring, rescue, and documentation of Ancient Near Eastern art and architecture following its destruction by ISIS. She is known for her discovery of one of Esarhaddon's palaces in Nineveh. [1]
Layla Salih was born in Mosul in 1975 in the family of an ex-soldier. She was the fourth of seven sons and six daughters. [1] [2]
She obtained her undergraduate degree in archaeology from the University of Baghdad. During the Iraq War, she completed a master's degree in archaeology. [1] Later, she obtained a PhD from the University of Mosul. [3]
Salih's oldest brother, Nadhim, was killed during the First Battle of al-Faw in 1986. She lost a brother to an al-Qaeda bomb in 2007. In 2011, her sister Khawlah, who was working for the Iraqi government, was shot by militants. When the militant group ISIS occupied Mosul, Salih and her family first evacuated to Kirkuk. She lived in Baghdad for a period, before moving to Erbil. There she joined the office of the provincial governor of Nineveh. [1]
Following her graduation, Salih obtained a role as curator at the Mosul Museum. Just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, anticipating the destruction of the museum's artifacts, she was tasked with transferring the collections to Baghdad. [1]
Salih was with Mosul Museum till 2009. After ISIS occupied the region in 2014, they emptied much of the museum and began a campaign of destruction of the area's pre-Islamic heritage. [4] Two Assyrian lamassu and a winged lion, each nearly 2 metres tall, which had been the centrepieces of the museum, were destroyed. Ninety-four precious objects of Assyrian history as well as Hellenic works were plundered or wrecked. [5] Salih and others begged ISIS to destroy the tombs and to leave the buildings intact, but the militants did not spare either the tombs or the buildings. [6]
ISIS was driven out of Nineveh province in November 2016. Salih and a colleague, Faisal Jaber, investigated and reported on the destruction of Christian sites in the province. [7] Next, Salih was tasked with examining the scale of the damage wrought on the monuments in Nimrud. At the time, she was the only antiquities official able to survey the scene, as nearly 50 other Iraqi archaeologists remained trapped in ISIS-controlled Mosul. Salih estimated that about 60 percent of the site was irredeemable, but she also felt that because a lot of the wreckage remained on location, much could be restored. [6] A joint committee of Unesco and the governor of Nineveh agreed to reinstate funding for a rebuilding of the site. [4] But the monuments and ruins remained unprotected, and open to looters. Salih asked the Iraqi militias to preserve as much of Nimrud as possible. [6]
In 2017, Salih began to document the destruction to the monuments in Nineveh. Beneath the Nabi Yunus shrine, her team found that ISIS had dug tunnels and broken into a hitherto unknown palace in search of antiquities to plunder and sell. Worried about the structural integrity of the walls, ISIS had left the area untouched. Salih discovered a cuneiform inscription of Esarhaddon, dating back to about 672 BC. The king's name does not appear in the inscription, but phrases separately identified with him do, and it describes his reconstruction of Babylon, previously destroyed by Sennacherib, his father. The team also found statues of an Assyrian goddess sprinkling the "water of life" on her devotees. [8] In contrast to previously known reliefs in which figures were depicted in profile, these were in frontal pose. Salih also discovered two alabaster lamassu. [9]
Salih reported that more than a hundred items of pottery, which were likely taken from the Nabi Yunus tunnels by ISIS, were recovered from a house in Mosul. [10]
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Nineveh was an ancient Assyrian city of Upper Mesopotamia, located on the outskirts of Mosul in modern-day northern Iraq. It is located on the eastern bank of the Tigris River and was the capital and largest city of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, as well as the largest city in the world for several decades. Today, it is a common name for the half of Mosul that lies on the eastern bank of the Tigris, and the country's Nineveh Governorate takes its name from it.
Sir Austen Henry Layard was an English traveller, archaeologist, cuneiformist, art historian, draughtsman, collector, politician and diplomat. He is best known as the excavator of Nimrud and of Nineveh, where he uncovered a large proportion of the Assyrian palace reliefs known, and in 1851 the library of Ashurbanipal.
Hormuzd Rassam, was an Iraqi-Assyrian Assyriologist who made a number of important archaeological discoveries from 1877 to 1882, including the clay tablets that contained the Epic of Gilgamesh, the world's oldest literature. He is accepted as the first-known Middle Eastern and Assyrian archaeologist from the Ottoman Empire. Later in life, he emigrated to the United Kingdom, where he was naturalized as a British citizen, settling in Brighton. He represented the government as a diplomat, helping to free British diplomats from captivity in Ethiopia.
Hatra was an ancient city in the Nineveh Governorate of present-day Iraq. The city lies 290 km (180 mi) northwest of Baghdad and 110 km (68 mi) southwest of Mosul.
Mosul is a major city in northern Iraq. Located approximately 400 km (250 mi) north of Baghdad, and 170 km (110 mi) southeast of the city of Cizre in Turkey, Mosul stands on the west bank of the Tigris, opposite the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh on the east bank. The metropolitan area has grown to encompass substantial areas on both the "Left Bank" and the "Right Bank", as the two banks are described by the locals compared to the flow direction of Tigris.
Nineveh Governorate is a governorate in northern Iraq that contains the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh. It was an integral part of Assyria from the 25th century BC to the seventh century AD. It has an area of 37,323 km2 (14,410 sq mi) and an estimated population of 2,453,000 people in 2003. Its chief city and provincial capital is Mosul, which lies across the Tigris river from the ruins of ancient Nineveh. Tal Afar is the second-biggest city. Before 1976, it was called Mosul Province and included the present-day Dohuk Governorate, which is now part of the autonomous Kurdistan Region.
Nimrud is an ancient Assyrian city located 30 kilometres (20 mi) south of the city of Mosul, and 5 kilometres (3 mi) south of the village of Selamiyah, in the Nineveh plains in Upper Mesopotamia. It was a major Assyrian city between approximately 1350 BC and 610 BC. The city is located in a strategic position 10 kilometres (6 mi) north of the point that the river Tigris meets its tributary the Great Zab. The city covered an area of 360 hectares. The ruins of the city were found within one kilometre (1,100 yd) of the modern-day Assyrian village of Noomanea in Nineveh Governorate, Iraq.
Lama, Lamma or Lamassu is a Sumerian protective deity. Initially depicted as a female deity in Sumerian times, when it was called Lamma, it was later depicted from Assyrian times as a hybrid of a human, bird, and either a bull or lion—specifically having a human head, the body of a bull or a lion, and bird wings, under the name Lamassu. In some writings, it is portrayed to represent a female deity. A less frequently used name is shedu, which refers to the male counterpart of a lamassu. Lamassu represent the zodiacs, parent-stars or constellations.
Dur-Sharrukin, present day Khorsabad, was the Assyrian capital in the time of Sargon II of Assyria. Khorsabad is a village in northern Iraq, 15 km northeast of Mosul. The great city was entirely built in the decade preceding 706 BC. After the unexpected death of Sargon in battle, the capital was shifted 20 km south to Nineveh.
Aššur (; Sumerian: 𒀭𒊹𒆠 AN.ŠAR2KI, Assyrian cuneiform: Aš-šurKI, "City of God Aššur"; Syriac: ܐܫܘܪ Āšūr; Old Persian 𐎠𐎰𐎢𐎼Aθur, Persian: آشور: Āšūr; Hebrew: אַשּׁוּר: Aššûr, Arabic: اشور), also known as Ashur and Qal'at Sherqat, was the capital of the Old Assyrian Empire (2025–1750 BC), the Middle Assyrian Empire (1365–1050 BC), and for a time, of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–608 BC). The remains of the city lie on the western bank of the Tigris River, north of the confluence with its tributary, the Little Zab, in what is now Iraq, more precisely in the al-Shirqat District of the Saladin Governorate.
BakhdidaSyriac pronunciation: [bɑχdɛːdə], also known as Baghdeda, Qaraqosh, or Al-Hamdaniya, is an Assyrian city in northern Iraq within the Nineveh Governorate, located about 32 km (20 mi) southeast of the city of Mosul and 60 km west of Erbil amid agricultural lands, close to the ruins of the ancient Assyrian cities Nimrud and Nineveh. It is connected to the main city of Mosul by two main roads. The first runs through the towns of Bartella and Karamles which connects to the city of Erbil as well. The second, which was gravel until being paved in the 1990s, is direct to Mosul. All of its citizens fled to Kurdistan Region after the ISIS invasion on August 6, 2014. The town was under control of ISIS until October 19, 2016 when it was liberated as part of the Battle of Mosul after which residents have begun to return.
The Islamic Sites of Mosul, Iraq, are of varied ages, the oldest being the Umayyad Mosque from 640 AD. and the modern being the Mosul Grand Mosque.
The Department of the Middle East, numbering some 330,000 works, forms a significant part of the collections of the British Museum, and the world's largest collection of Mesopotamian antiquities outside Iraq. The collections represent the civilisations of the ancient Near East and its adjacent areas.
Donny George Youkhanna was an Iraqi-Assyrian archaeologist, anthropologist, author, curator, and scholar, and a visiting professor at Stony Brook University in New York.
The Mosul Museum is the second largest museum in Iraq after the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad. It was heavily looted during the 2003 Iraq War. Founded in 1952, the museum consisted of a small hall until a new building was opened in 1972, containing ancient Assyrian artifacts. The museums net worth and content value are around 50 to 80 to 250 million according to museum specialists during 2013 at least. Dr. Hikmat Al-Aswad was the Director from 2004-2011. The current director is Zaid Ghazi Saadallah.
The destruction of Mosul Museum artifacts became publicly known on February 26, 2015 when the group known as ISIL released a video showing their destruction.
Deliberate destruction and theft of cultural heritage has been conducted by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant since 2014 in Iraq, Syria, and to a lesser extent in Libya. The destruction targets various places of worship under ISIL control and ancient historical artifacts. In Iraq, between the fall of Mosul in June 2014 and February 2015, ISIL had plundered and destroyed at least 28 historical religious buildings. Valuable items from some buildings were looted in order to smuggle and sell them to foreigners to finance the running of the Islamic State. By March 2019, ISIL lost most of its territory in the Middle East.
The Tal Afar Citadel is a citadel located in Tal Afar, a city in Nineveh Governorate in northwest Iraq. The citadel was built by the Ottoman Empire, although it contains remains dating back to the Assyrian period.
Assyrian sculpture is the sculpture of the ancient Assyrian states, especially the Neo-Assyrian Empire of 911 to 612 BC, which ruled modern Iraq, Syria, and much of Iran. It forms a phase of the art of Mesopotamia, differing in particular because of its much greater use of stone and gypsum alabaster for large sculpture.
Bahija Khalil was an Iraqi archaeologist and director of the Iraq Museum from 1983 to 1989. She was the first woman director of the museum.