Northwest Palace, Nimrud, ancient Assyria (modern Iraq)

The Northwest Palace (so named because it is situated at the northwest corner of the citadel mound at Nimrud, an ancient capital of the Assyrian empire) was first discovered in the 1840s. It had been excavated nearly continuously since then up until its total destruction by ISIS barrel bombs in the spring of 2015. The few hundred surviving over-life-size wall reliefs from the palace are scattered in over 75 museums around the world. These two conditions make study and understanding of the enormous palace, once the best preserved and prototypical of all the ancient Near Eastern palaces, difficult, if not impossible. Learning Sites began building an interactive virtual reality re-creation of the palace in the late 1990s, to help scholars comprehend the scale, lighting, decorative schemes, and narrative sculpture from the point of view of the ancient Assyrians. Due to the enormity of the task, the globally dispersed nature of the remains, and the inability to visit the site, the project continues to slowly expand across the building complex and its context on the citadel (to view more about those efforts, please visit our Northwest Palace project pages).

This page here provides supplemental material in the form of a single interactive 3D preliminary model of an Assyrian queen.

Navigation tips (depending on the speed of your Internet connection, the model below may take a few moments to load): use the left mouse button or left button and touchpad to rotate around the model (side to side or up and down); and use the right edge of the touchpad or mouse wheel to zoom. This will enable you to inspect the model closely. More background about our Assyrian Queen project can be found here.