The statue, a colossal Assyrian guardian lion from about 860 BCE, was destroyed by Islamic State (ISIS) while it was on display at the Mosul Museum in 2015, along with much of the museum’s contents.
The reconstruction of works destroyed by ISIS militants has been a point of arts and heritage focus for some years now. Beginning in 2015, a campaign called ‘Project Mosul’, cyber-archaeologists and volunteers took to 3D imaging to re-create works of art that would otherwise be lost.
The destruction of ancient artifacts, some millennia-old, would often be depicted in ISIS propaganda videos as part of an offensive on ‘idolatry’.
Other artifacts were looted by the group and sold on the black market as a source of income to fund their atrocities. Many of these antiquities have yet to be recovered.
The display of printed versions of artifacts is significant because “it's showing how technology and how the public can contribute to recovering cultural heritage when it's destroyed. And this is part of what the exhibition talks about," says Tamsin Silvey, Cultural Programme Curator at Historic England.
The exhibition, entitled ‘What Remains,’ opens on Friday, 5 July and runs for a six-month period.
