http://www.georgiabulletin.org/world/2012/05/15/NEWS-4/

However, what has happened to Akrawi is no joke.

It’s a stark and somewhat confusing reality.

A Chaldean refugee from Iraq who fled Baghdad and the personal wrath of Saddam Hussein, eventually landing in Metro Detroit in the spring of 1968, Akrawi — described in federal records as the one-time “Godfather” of the area’s vast Chaldean community — was convicted in Wayne County Recorder’s Court in 1996 of second-degree murder and sentenced to 15 to 25 years behind bars.

After serving 15 1/2 years in prison, the former Oakland County restaurateur and businessman was paroled back in November and released to his family in late February.

That’s where things get complicated.

In a rare move, following five days as a free man — spent with family and friends in Macomb County — the Michigan Parole Board decided to rescind Akrawi’s parole. The 64-year old, who wasn’t known to have violated any of his parole restrictions while free, was called into a meeting with his parole officer on Monday, Feb. 27 and taken back into custody.

http://www.theoaklandpress.com/video/?va_id=3484667&pl_id=&ref=synd

http://www.theoaklandpress.com/articles/2012/05/15/news/local_news/doc4fb291ed40e58340478947.txt

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — While their numbers are small and their material resources are few, members of the Eastern Catholic churches in the United States have much to offer the country in terms of their fidelity to Christ despite persecution and their deeply religious cultures, said Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, prefect of the Congregation for Eastern Churches.

Eastern Catholics “are a bridge” supporting Catholics in their homelands with prayers, advocacy and financial support while at the same time enriching the United States with their cultural and religious identity, Cardinal Sandri told U.S. bishops from the Chaldean, Ruthenian, Maronite, Ukrainian, Armenian, Melkite, Syriac and Romanian Catholic churches.

The cardinal met with the 14 bishops May 15 to discuss a wide variety of common concerns at the beginning of the bishops’ “ad limina” visits to the Vatican. Earlier in the morning, the cardinal was the main celebrant and homilist at a Mass with the bishops in St. Peter’s Basilica.

The heads of every diocese or eparchy — as the Eastern Catholic jurisdictions are known — send detailed reports on their dioceses to the Vatican before the “ad limina” visits.

Summarizing what was common in the reports of the Eastern Catholic dioceses, Cardinal Sandri said, “Your territories are enormous, and your communities often find themselves far from each other. Some of the eparchies are young and still in need of adequate structures.” Many of the dioceses — some of which cover the entire United States or even the United States and Canada — have few financial resources and the situation has been “exacerbated by the economic crisis,” the cardinal said.

The arrival of new immigrants, many fleeing persecution in places like Iraq, have increased the size of several of the Eastern churches, like the Chaldean Catholic Church. But the cardinal said other Eastern churches, whose membership is composed largely of people who have been in the United States for several generations, “are experiencing a dramatic fall” in their numbers.

“You are not immune to the same corrosive effect on morals and family life as are your fellow Latin Catholics,” Cardinal Sandri said.

All the churches are hurting for clergy, he said. Even those that have a relatively high proportion of clergy to faithful are stretched by the great distances those priests must travel to minister to the faithful.

The cardinal urged care in helping young people discern their vocation, “maintaining formation programs, integrating immigrant priests (and) embracing celibacy in respect of the ecclesial context” of the United States where mandatory celibacy is the general rule for priests.

During his homily at the morning Mass with the bishops at the tomb of St. Peter, Cardinal Sandri said, “Many people today have come to doubt that there is still holiness or honesty in the church and in the clergy. We must prove them wrong. We can be a true community of saints who shine as models of chastity and charity before a culture in great need of this witness.”

The Eastern Catholic bishops formed the last group of bishops from the United States making their visits “ad limina apostolorum” (to the threshold of the apostles) to pray at the tombs of the apostles Peter and Paul, to meet with Pope Benedict XVI and to visit Vatican officials to discuss issues of common concern.

As they did with the other groups, seminarians from the Pontifical North American College served as lectors, cantors and servers at the Eastern bishops’ Mass, but they were joined by Eastern-rite seminarians studying at the Pontifical Russicum College.

Cardinal Sandri told the bishops that sometimes they might feel like the first apostles who, after having spent time with Jesus, were sent out on mission “into a hostile world.”

“You, dear Eastern bishops, as representatives of the diverse Eastern churches in the Catholic Church, are living symbols of the apostles who set out in all directions from Jerusalem to establish Christian communities. Like them you have encountered opposition, indifference and ignorance along the way,” he said.

Jesus knew the challenges his disciples would face, which is why he promised them the Holy Spirit, the cardinal said.

He urged the Eastern Catholic bishops to join their Latin-right counterparts in the United States to “fight against the rising tide of religious intolerance. May your courage and confidence convince the multitudes that without God there is no peace, no prosperity, no salvation.”

END

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1201976.htm

Eastern Catholics “are a bridge” supporting Catholics in their homelands with prayers, advocacy and financial support while at the same time enriching the United States with their cultural and religious identity, Cardinal Sandri told U.S. bishops from the Chaldean, Ruthenian, Maronite, Ukrainian, Armenian, Melkite, Syriac and Romanian Catholic churches.

The cardinal met with the 14 bishops May 15 to discuss a wide variety of common concerns at the beginning of the bishops’ “ad limina” visits to the Vatican. Earlier in the morning, the cardinal was the main celebrant and homilist at a Mass with the bishops in St. Peter’s Basilica.

The heads of every diocese or eparchy — as the Eastern Catholic jurisdictions are known — send detailed reports on their dioceses to the Vatican before the “ad limina” visits.

Summarizing what was common in the reports of the Eastern Catholic dioceses, Cardinal Sandri said, “Your territories are enormous, and your communities often find themselves far from each other. Some of the eparchies are young and still in need of adequate structures.” Many of the dioceses — some of which cover the entire United States or even the United States and Canada — have few financial resources and the situation has been “exacerbated by the economic crisis,” the cardinal said.

The arrival of new immigrants, many fleeing persecution in places like Iraq, have increased the size of several of the Eastern churches, like the Chaldean Catholic Church. But the cardinal said other Eastern churches, whose membership is composed largely of people who have been in the United States for several generations, “are experiencing a dramatic fall” in their numbers.

“You are not immune to the same corrosive effect on morals and family life as are your fellow Latin Catholics,” Cardinal Sandri said.

All the churches are hurting for clergy, he said. Even those that have a relatively high proportion of clergy to faithful are stretched by the great distances those priests must travel to minister to the faithful.

The cardinal urged care in helping young people discern their vocation, “maintaining formation programs, integrating immigrant priests (and) embracing celibacy in respect of the ecclesial context” of the United States where mandatory celibacy is the general rule for priests.

During his homily at the morning Mass with the bishops at the tomb of St. Peter, Cardinal Sandri said, “Many people today have come to doubt that there is still holiness or honesty in the church and in the clergy. We must prove them wrong. We can be a true community of saints who shine as models of chastity and charity before a culture in great need of this witness.”

The Eastern Catholic bishops formed the last group of bishops from the United States making their visits “ad limina apostolorum” (to the threshold of the apostles) to pray at the tombs of the apostles Peter and Paul, to meet with Pope Benedict XVI and to visit Vatican officials to discuss issues of common concern.

As they did with the other groups, seminarians from the Pontifical North American College served as lectors, cantors and servers at the Eastern bishops’ Mass, but they were joined by Eastern-rite seminarians studying at the Pontifical Russicum College.

Cardinal Sandri told the bishops that sometimes they might feel like the first apostles who, after having spent time with Jesus, were sent out on mission “into a hostile world.”

“You, dear Eastern bishops, as representatives of the diverse Eastern churches in the Catholic Church, are living symbols of the apostles who set out in all directions from Jerusalem to establish Christian communities. Like them you have encountered opposition, indifference and ignorance along the way,” he said.

Jesus knew the challenges his disciples would face, which is why he promised them the Holy Spirit, the cardinal said.

He urged the Eastern Catholic bishops to join their Latin-right counterparts in the United States to “fight against the rising tide of religious intolerance. May your courage and confidence convince the multitudes that without God there is no peace, no prosperity, no salvation.”

END

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1201976.htm

Meeting with a Whole Foods community advisory panel prior to the 9:45 a.m. groundbreaking, Robb said Whole Foods hopes to nurture local food suppliers whose products will appear on Whole Foods shelves, as well as take a role in educating the community on healthy eating.

“We’re really excited to be here,” Robb said. “I promise you we’re going to be here with humility. We’re going to need your help.”

The groundbreaking, featuring Mayor Dave Bing, U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and other leaders, drew more than 200 well-wishers and capped a nearly two-and-a-half-year process in which Whole Foods examined whether it should open one of its upscale groceries in a distressed urban market like Detroit. The decision marks Whole Foods’ first venture into such a market after already operating more than 300 stores in three nations, including some in Detroit’s suburbs.

Several other cities, including Chicago, have now asked Whole Foods to open stores in their communities following the Detroit example, Robb said. But he said he was happy that Detroit was first.

“The richness that we discovered here was very encouraging,” Robb said. “That’s special for me.”

And to the question of whether Whole Foods could be profitable in an urban market like Detroit, he said, “My expectation is a healthy, successful store.”

The 21,000-square-foot Whole Foods will be located on the north side of Mack between Woodward and John R. Construction will take about a year and the store should open in early 2013. The store will employ about 75 workers.

Bing called the groundbreaking a wonderful day in the city.

“Too often we focus on the negative things that are happening in our city. Today is a positive reckoning that there are people who believe in the city of Detroit and its resurgence,” Bing said.

Some of the people who put together the complex financial deal to bring Whole Foods to the city emphasized how difficult it remains to do real estate development when traditional lenders will not invest in the city. Building Whole Foods in Midtown required a layering of a half-dozen different sources of untraditional finance, including multiple tax credits.

“To do a project like this is a really complicated transaction that requires a lot of people and a lot of time and really hard work,” said Sue Mosey, president of the nonprofit group Midtown Detroit Inc., who helped bring in Whole Foods.

Peter Cummings, chairman of RAM Realty Services, the owner and developer of the Whole Foods site, noted that his firm had owned the site for 16 years before drawing a major development.

“We’ve owned it a long time, but I can safely say today it was worth the wait,” Cummings told the audience.

The Whole Foods arrival did not come without controversy. Independent grocers in Detroit have complained that major national retailers like Whole Foods and Meijer are coming thanks to generous tax breaks that aren’t available to existing grocers.

Eric Younan, a spokesman for the Detroit Independent Grocers, an affiliate of the Chaldean American Chamber of Commerce, said there are 83 full-service groceries in the city already. He defined “full service” as a store with at least 10,000 square feet of space and at least four departments: meat, dairy, produce and frozen foods.

“Detroit independent grocers welcome competition. We just want a level playing field,” Younan said Monday. “We’ve been committed to serving Detroit for more than 30 years. We’re loyal to the city. We just don’t feel that loyalty is being reciprocated.”

Noting that some existing local grocers have criticized the opening of a major corporate grocery chain in Midtown, Robb asked for understanding.

“Can we get past the stereotype of corporation comes to a community?” he said. “I really love this community. Can you take us at our word that that’s what we’re trying to do?”

http://www.freep.com/article/20120514/BUSINESS06/120514018/Whole-Foods-Midtown-Detroit?odyssey=nav%7Chead

At Tuesday’s dinner, K?l?çdaro?lu met with Fener Greek Patriarch Bartholomew, Chief Rabbi of Turkish Jews ?sak Haleva, Archbishop Aram Ate?yan of the Armenian Patriarchate, Turkish Syriac Orthodox Archbishop Yusuf Çetin and Deputy Patriarch of the Turkey’s Syriac Catholic Church Yusuf Sa? as well as other members of various civil society organizations representing these religious communities.

CHP Deputy Chairman Faruk Lo?o?lu, CHP parliamentary group deputy chairman Akif Hamzaçebi, several CHP deputies, Party Council members and the mayors of the Adalar and Sar?yer districts were also in attendance at the meeting, which was closed to the press. Journalists were briefly allowed to take photographs before the start of the event.

On Wednesday, Lo?o?lu released a written statement about the dinner. The statement noted that the CHP’s initiative to meet with representatives of non-Muslim communities was welcomed by the religious leaders, who stated that their only demand was to be treated equally with any other citizen of the Republic of Turkey. The statement said the guests also requested the help of the CHP in resolving certain issues.

K?l?çdaro?lu expressed his happiness at having met with the leaders and members of the civil society groups that represent religious minorities and noted that the CHP was committed to addressing the issues of non-Muslim communities.

http://www.todayszaman.com/newsDetail_getNewsById.action?newsId=279836

Najeeb Dawood stabbed Eman Hurmiz to death at their Strathmore home in September 2011.

He had earlier pleaded guilty to the murder, and at Wellington High Court today he pleaded guilty to charges relating to an incident in November 2010, including assault on a 13-year-old, threatening to kill and possession of a weapon, Newstalk ZB reported.

Today the court heard the chilling facts of the violent, controlling relationship between Dawood and his family for more than 20 years – culminating in him stabbing his wife 55 times then attempting to kill himself.

His lawyer said he suffered from ‘delusional jealousy’ and believed his wife was having an affair.

The couple were Assyrian, a predominantly Christian minority living mostly in Iraq and Syria. Assyrian Association New Zealand spokesman Sarjon Warde today said the murder last year had affected the whole Assyrian community.

“The whole community was shocked, and it was just a huge shock on the community.”

The family was well known in the community, especially Ms Hurmiz, who Mr Warde described as a “friendly, very nice lady”.

The family was not prepared to comment.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10805832

The artist gave his first performance Saturday at Galata’s Greek School. The show will continue to be performed at the school through May 30. The word “S?lsel” is thought to mean the fluttering of wings in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus and the original language of the Bible. The Syriac language is a variant of Aramaic, which was also the language in which Eastern Christianity was diffused.

“S?lsel” is a depiction of the sky painted on ceilings of old Syriac houses in Mardin, which takes the form of a rectangular pattern with zigzag lines in tones of turquoise. According to legend, oppressed Syriacs, fearing to set foot on the street, would paint this pattern on the ceiling of their homes to alleviate their deep yearning for the real sky. “S?lsel” is a collaborative weaving of the one common sky we yearn to live under with no fear.

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ataman-contributes-to-the-theater-festival.aspx?pageID=238&nID=20646&NewsCatID=385

In a statement issued on Friday, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and All East Ignatius IV Hazim, Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and All the East Ignatius Zakka I Iwas and Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch of Antioch and All East Gregory III Laham called for giving priority to the homeland’s interests above all else away from violence on the basis of justice, citizenship, freedom of expression and all that serves the country.

The patriarchs prayed for the martyrs to rest in peace and for the bereaved to be relieved, calling upon the fellow Syrians to join them in their prayer to protect Syria.

Pope of Vatican Condemns Damascus Terrorist Bombings

Pope Benedict XVI of the Vatican on Friday vehemently condemned Damascus twin terrorist bombings which occurred near al-Qazaz crowded intersection at the southern ring-road .

AFP quoted spokesman for the Holy See’s Spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, as saying that we strongly condemn the tragic attacks which stained Damascus’ streets with blood and express our sympathy with the families of the victims.

Fr Lombardi, in a statement, added that these attacks should push all sides towards more commitment to the Annan’s plan.

” The path of respect, dialogue and reconciliation should be followed soon,” the statement said. Earlier, the Vatican expressed strong support to the plan of the UN Envoy to Syria Kofi Annan to resolve the crisis.

M. Ismael / Ghossoun

http://www.sana.sy/eng/21/2012/05/11/418303.htm

CAMBRIDGE, England, May 10 (UPI) — Archaeologists working in Turkey say they’ve found evidence of a forgotten language dating back more than 2,500 years to the time of the Assyrian Empire.

Researchers from Cambridge University in Britain, working at the probable site of the ancient Assyrian city of Tushan, said the language may have been spoken by deportees originally from the Zagros Mountains, on the border of modern-day Iran and Iraq.

Under a policy widely practiced across the Assyrian Empire, those people may have been forcibly moved from their homeland and resettled in what is now southeast Turkey, the researchers said.

“It was an approach which helped [Assyrians] to consolidate power by breaking the control of the ruling elite in newly-conquered areas,” Cambridge researcher John MacGinnis said. “If people were deported to a new location, they were entirely dependent on the Assyrian administration for their well-being.”

The evidence for the language they spoke comes from a single clay tablet that survived the fire that destroyed a palace in Tushan, inscribed with cuneiform characters that list the names of women who were attached to the palace and the local Assyrian administration.

“Altogether around 60 names are preserved,” MacGinnis said. “One or two are actually Assyrian and a few more may belong to other known languages of the period, such as Luwian or Hurrian, but the great majority belong to a previously unidentified language.

“We know from existing texts that the Assyrians did conquer people from that region [western Iran.] Now we know that there is another language, perhaps from the same area, and maybe more evidence of its existence waiting to be discovered.”

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2012/05/10/Tablet-in-Turkey-contains-unknown-language/UPI-54491336695709/#ixzz1ujd5rWMN

Haditha, always on my mind!

What’s the first that thing comes to an English-language reader’s mind when hearing the name Haditha? Nothing but the November 2005 incident. Haditha, this beautiful town, is unfortunately associated with the bloody images of what the US Marines had done that year.

When you do a search on the web about Haditha , all you get is: Haditha killing, Haditha shooting, Haditha-Iraq war, the ghost of Haditha. The internet gives basic geographical facts on this Iraqi city such as its famous dam and data regarding this place, such as its location in al Anbar Province (240 kilometers west of Baghdad).

For me, the memories of Haditha go way beyond the killing; it’s such a fascinating town and it’s the people who make it that way. I was born in this peaceful place that lay along the banks of the mighty Euphrates River. My parents moved there from an Assyrian Christian village in northern Iraq in 1946. My father was a medic at the hospital in a camp that belonged to the Iraqi Petroleum Company (IPC). The oil camp in Haditha was an important station for the pipeline that started in Kirkuk and ran through al Anbar Province where the pipeline got pumped before making its way to Haifa and Tripoli on the Mediterranean. A high percentage of IPC employees were from various Iraqi ethnic groups like Assyrians, Armenians, Kurds, and Turkmens who were accepted graciously by the locals.
The Hadithi doctors in the emergency room called my father “doctor” as a gesture of appreciation for his abilities with his magical hands. It seemed that every patient he treated went home healed! He was a deeply spiritual man and this best manifested itself in his work with the infirm.

It was there where I first learned to enjoy nature. It was there that I became accustomed to living near bodies of water and it is no coincidence that I now live along the shoreline of Lake Michigan. I explicitly remember the unique and calming sounds of the waterwheels that existed in Haditha and other parts of Iraq and Syria. Those who left this town decades ago still long for and fondly remember those indelible sounds. At home we lived an organic life where the only electrical device we had at home was a radio next to an oversized loud washer that my mother had for over thirty five years.

In Haditha, where people never locked their doors at night, is where I had a joyous childhood. I played with my sisters outside on hot afternoons till dusk. Moreover, I’ve learned from my sisters how to imitate a Hadithi bride and her Henna painted hands by crushing a variety of dry leaves to stain our own little hands. One time, we snuck into the neighbors’ wedding just to see the bride and the way she was seated atop of an elevated platform. I ran with my peers in the green fields and the stony desert. The sharp-edged caves were homes for foxes and in the narrow cracks wild purple desert flowers grew into plush nesting grounds for pigeons.

I was five when I asked my mother to buy me an abaya, the long black veil. For me, the Iraqi abaya was and will always be a symbol of femininity rather than a religious veil. Women wore sleeveless tops underneath it on hot summer days. When my mother finally got me one, I enjoyed wearing it until it caught fire one day as I foolishly wore it in the our backyard with my sister’s high heels (five sizes bigger than my own shoes) wishing to look like local women I normally saw in the market. Luckily, my mother snagged it from my head. That was the first and last abaya I ever had. I still long to have one.

The word Haditha in Arabic means “new” so every time someone mentions this ancient town, he or she speaks Arabic! It is believed that the Romans settled there since the waterwheel method and the canal system were used by the Romans for irrigation purposes.

I strongly believe that Haditha, in the near future, will be a tourist destination where ferries will be taking people from one bank of the river to the other for sightseeing. I can already imagine people sitting beside old bridges relaxing, drinking cardamom tea while listening to the sound of water falling off the old wooden waterwheels and small cruise ships are traveling down the river serving lavish dinners of grilled fish and local music playing in the background filled with sounds of the Arabic flute made of apricot trees.

Beautiful, historic Haditha, a town filled with peaceful and tolerant people–those are the ways I remember such a city. The rest of the world may have its own image of it, but I certainly have my own!

Layla Qasrany an Iraqi-American writer who published her first novel in Arabic (Sahdoutha) in 2011.

THE WONDERS OF ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA
Melbourne Museum, until October 7

IN OUR end is our beginning. As visitors leave The Wonders of Ancient Mesopotamia they pass a video message from Sarah Collins, curator of the British Museum’s Early Mesopotamia collections, from whence this exhibition derives.

She reminds those about to escalate up from the Melbourne Museum basement that “it is a challenge for us today to feel a connection” to the peoples of Sumer, Assyria and Babylon, the civilisations of the remote past that produced the ”wonders” on display.

Assyrian king Ashurbanipal’s Dying Lion relic. Photo: By permission of the Trustees of the British Museum.

But the connection, or rather connections, exist, and in case anyone might have missed them while perambulating through the exhibition, Ms Collins offers a summary. Our measurements of time and the physical universe – the 60-second minute, the 60-minute hour, the 12-month year and the zodiac, the 360 degrees of the circle – all derive from the mathematics and surveying techniques of the ancient Mesopotamians. Even more central to the thread of civilisation, so does the medium of communication that connects The Age to its readers. The Mesopotamians invented the oldest known systems of writing, too.

There is distinct difference in tone between The Wonders of Mesopotamia and Melbourne Museum’s previous forays into ancient worlds, The Treasures of Tutankhamun and A Day in Pompeii. It is as though the curators felt a need to defend one of the things that museums traditionally exist to do: to inform those who visit them while trying to entertain, too.

Perhaps it is because Tutankhamen, the mysterious boy king with the glittering tomb, and the wretched Pompeians, victims of a disaster even more spectacular than the iceberg-stricken Titanic, entertain so effortlessly that we scarcely notice what we might be learning.

A cuneiform writing tablet (C.3000BC). Photo: By permission of the Trustees of the British Museum.

And of course, Tut’s glitter shone so very brightly that he seems a hard act to follow. But for those who can only be lured by gold, Wonders of Mesopotamia has it, too, albeit in lesser amounts. A resplendent lapis lazuli necklace with gold leaf pendants, and associated jewellery found in the King’s Grave in the Sumerian city of Ur, is testimony that the ancient Mesopotamians were as in love with luxury as any ancient Egyptian or modern Melburnian.

The curators are nonetheless resolved that we should never forget that our connection to this particular clutch of ancient cultures goes way beyond a shared predilection for bling. On entering Wonders, an illustrated timeline, winding back from 2012 to several millennia BCE, walks the visitor through culture after culture, each linked by its reliance on that world-changing Sumerian invention, writing.

It is though we are being warned: this is serious. But that is as it should be, and if Melbourne Museum is worried that Wonders might not draw the hordes who turned out to pay homage to Tut, it should not be. Visitors who were as moved by the boy king’s plain wooden chair as by anything made of gold – and there were many of us – will not feel cheated here.

A catapult from the interactive Ancient Rome exhibit. Photo: By permission of the Trustees of the British Museum.

A great deal of ingenuity has been employed in prompting visitors to find the familiar in the apparently unfamiliar. The carved reliefs depicting the military victories and hunting expeditions of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal may seem severe and unapproachably remote to those seeing them for the first time, but the computer-generated graphics that are used as commentaries help to dissolve the culture barrier.

A lion threatens one of Ashurbanipal’s attendants, and the mighty king, approaching the beast from the rear, grabs it by the tail. This is depicted on the relief, and very bizarre it seems; but the CGI strip shows the same events in motion, and suddenly we get it: this is political spin leavened by humour, just like any photo opportunity staged for a modern politician.

Some purists of museum-going object to this kind of cartoonish clarification, preferring the traditional labels and scholarly commentaries. Wonders has those, too, but privileging any one kind of interpretative technique in an exhibition of this kind surely misunderstands what the exhibition is seeking to do.

Other purists will feel uncomfortable with the fact that not everything on display was retrieved from an archaeological site in Iraq. Some of the exhibits are copies, for the obvious and unavoidable fact that they are too precious or fragile to transport around the world. The same was true of Treasures of Tutankahmen, of course, for Tut himself did not accompany his gold to Melbourne. His mummy isn’t leaving Cairo, and visitors had to be content with a facsimile instead.

For me, none of this invalidates exhibitions of this kind, or makes them only bigger and grander versions of the Ancient Rome exhibition in Melbourne’s Docklands, which displays scale models of various Roman engineering devices, some of which visitors may handle and use. (Parents of small children may be reassured that the hands-on exhibits in Rome do not include the military catapult or the battering ram).

Interpretation of ancient artefacts is one of the things that museums do, whether through scholarly research or public exhibits, and any expectation that museum visitors might make a connection between older forms of human experience and their own without some form of mediation – sometimes including fabrication – will always be a vain one.

All human knowledge is mediated if it can be transmitted at all.

It’s what’s been happening ever since the Sumerians hit on the idea of turning their primitive pictographs into the script we call cuneiform. Those abstract strokes, to be seen on the tiny cylinder seals that abound in the glass cases of Wonders, began writing. Go and marvel at them; they beat bling any day.

The prophet Isaiah reminds us that you should never forget “the rock from which you are hewn.”

And in the Book of Deuteronomy we are told to “remember the days of old; consider the generations long ago; ask your father to recount it, and your elders to tell you the tale.”

Knowing who we are and knowing our personal and family story is one of the reasons why the New Testament contains a detailed genealogy through which Jesus traces all his forbearers.

Knowing who you are and cherishing your community’s and your family’s narrative is an essential part of everyone’s make-up. Knowing who you are gives self knowledge, security and confidence; the absence of this knowledge sows seeds of insecurity and instability.

The Oracle at Delphi offered the wise advice to the Lydian King Croesus, “Know thyself and you will know how to live.” The deep desire to know the rock from which we were hewn undoubtedly explains why television programmes such as “Who do you think you are?” and genealogy sites are so popular.

The importance of knowing your story – who you are – the rock from which you are hewn – is not a new urge or a need identified by modern psychiatry. Central of the Jewish community’s celebration of Pesach, or Passover, is a 3,300 year-old ritual which involves a child questioning an adult about the Jewish story – the Haggadah. It is a story which Jews say begins with the bread of affliction and ends with the wine of freedom.

It is a loving act of remembering and through more than a hundred generations of Jews have handed on their story to their children.

The word Haggadah means “to relate, to tell, to expound”. But it also means “to bind, to join to connect”. The old story binds one generation to the next; connecting past with future; and joining people of the present with their community throughout the world and throughout time; and above all, the telling of the story honours the presence of God in the affairs of mankind.

Being deprived of your story is a most serious deprivation.

Self evidently, there are many forms of material deprivation, and this is a tough time to be young and leaving school.

My generation used to agonise over the prospect of a nuclear war; this generation agonises over the lack of economic security, especially the lack of jobs. But, in many respects, a far worse deprivation is the loss of identity experienced by so many young people today. I think of the 800,000 children who have no contact with their fathers. All too frequently there is no longer a father or an elder to tell the tale of their family or to explain their community’s history to the rising generation.

Consider also the effect on children who will deliberately be denied knowledge of their biological origins.

I strongly opposed the last Government’s decision to allow any two people to be listed as the parents of a child on the child’s official birth certificate. This was a classic example of how, instead of placing a child’s interests first, we treat them like accessories.

Biologically these men and women are not the child’s parents and the State has no business collaborating in a lie. Straightforwardly, this deceit is simply identity theft. As if all of this were not bad enough, consider the gravest deprivation of all – the loss of religious identity and the loss of faith.

This, too, as I will argue tonight, is also a consequence of a combination of the breakdown of strong family and community life along with the deliberate actions of the State.

There is nowhere better to make the case for knowing the story of our faith – and recalling the price which has been paid for our right to practice and to share our faith and the things which we believe about the dignity of the human person made in God’s image– than Tyburn.

From the crucifixion of Christ Himself, to the stoning to death of Stephen; from the execution of Peter, Paul and the early disciples, to the deaths of maybe as many as 100,000 people at the hands of emperors such as Nero and Diocletian; to the executions of Penal times and the mass murders of the bloodied 20th century – when more people lost their lives for their faith than in all the previous centuries combined – we have a precious narrative entrusted to us and which must be passed to those who follow.

This is sanctified, holy ground: As TS Eliot wrote of the murder of St Thomas a Becket in Canterbury Cathedral:

“Wherever a saint has dwelt,
Wherever a Martyr has given his blood for Christ,
There is holy ground,
And the sanctity shall not depart from it.”

And, on this ground, just yards from where we are gathered, between 1535 until 1681, 105 Catholic men and women gave their lives for their faith – a sacrifice which paved the way for the religious freedoms and liberties which we enjoy today, and which, too often, we take for granted.

I do not believe in theocracy and would go to the scaffold myself for the principle that a man must be free not to believe in God. Paradoxically, the new ideology of angry atheism would, however, deny to believers the right to pray in a public place; to preach openly what they believe; or even the right to wear a necklace bearing a cross.

In Britain the principle challenge to Christianity is a combination of this Dawkins/Hitchens school of angry atheism and the more insidious threat of the sheer indifference of those who don’t know what it is they have rejected; who don’t know their story.

The late Christopher Hitchens, author of “God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” claimed that religion is “the main source of hatred in the world”. Dawkins asserts that the crimes committed by Stalin and Hitler were not attributable to their atheism but because they were able to manipulate people’s religious sentiments.

Alexis de Tocqueville better understood human impulse and the nature of evil when he argued with passion that religion is central for the upholding of freedom itself.

All who love liberty should “hasten to call religion to their aid, for they must know that the reign of freedom cannot be established without that of mores, not mores founded without beliefs.”

Be clear, when we fail to re-appropriate and tell the story of those who gave their lives that we might be free to believe; when we fail to locate the Tyburn story in today’s continuing worldwide struggle for religious freedom, we create freedom without mores – and whether it is in the culture of the City of London or the new rampant materialism of China, freedom without mores has disastrous consequences.

Suppression of religious belief simultaneously dishonours memory and in robbing our children of their own story we rob them of their identity.

Sharmi Chakrabarti, the admirable Director of Liberty, put the same thought into the domestic context when she said that “The Christian’s right to wear a cross must be defended as fiercely as any other religious liberty….the struggle for religious freedom has been strongly connected with the struggle for democracy itself.”

And Amnesty International is right when it asserts that: “The right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion is a fundamental component of the universal and indivisible human rights framework that applies to all people everywhere, as laid out in international law.

“Restrictions on religious freedoms, as well as other freedoms including social, cultural and linguistic freedoms, can often lead to other human rights violations such as the imprisonment of prisoners of conscience or even death” We must be clear about that struggle and the interconnectedness of history with the present day, and the interconnectedness of the banning of a person’s right to wear a cross with the most vicious forms of discrimination and persecution. The Tyburn story is a story has great application in our own times.

The first recorded execution at Tyburn occurred in 1196 when William Fitz Osbern – a populist leader of London’s poor – was seized at the church of St Mary le Bow and was dragged naked behind a horse and hanged.

Four hundred years later the public execution of Catholics began. The first martyrs of the Protestant Reformation – St John Houghton and his four companions – were executed together at Tyburn on 4 May 1535. In June, John Fisher and in July, Thomas More, would be executed outside the Tower of London.

Two years later, the focus shifted back to Tyburn when, in 1537 Nicholas Tempest, one of the northern leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace – the king’s own Bow bearer of the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire, close to where I live – was hanged on the orders of Henry VIII, whose death did not signal the end of Catholic persecution. In 1571, during the reign of Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I, the Tyburn Tree was erected – allowing three condemned people to be hanged at once. Among them were the 105 Catholic men and women Tyburn martyrs. They included Edmund Campion (1581), Robert Southwell (1595), Anne Line (1601), John Southworth (1654); and the last of the martyrs, the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland, Oliver Plunkett (1681).

Tyburn’s is a poignant and disturbing story of immense cruelty and barbarism; it is a story of a perverted legal system; and it reminds us to what intolerance, the crushing of conscience, and what Thomas More described as the breaking of “the unity of life” inexorably leads.

The story of Tyburn is not a story calling for revenge or to be used for the stoking of old hatreds but it is an instructive story which the elders fail to tell their children at their peril. As Edmund Campion stood on the Tyburn scaffold, he famously prayed that the day would come when he and those who were sending him to his death would meet in heaven: “I recommend your case, and mine, to Almighty God, the Searcher of hearts, to the end that we may at last be friends in heaven, when all injuries shall be forgotten.”

Our faith teaches us to forgive but until we meet in heaven we are not commanded to forget.

The Tyburn story must never be forgotten because the moment a nation slips intocollective amnesia it risks repeating the old mistakes. Never again happens all over again.

Tyburn’s is an instructive and inspiring story which must be told because of the courage, heroism and virtue which it represents. It must be told because of the high price which was paid. We all know that when a faith is worth dying for, it is worth living for.

I am always struck by the effect which the gruesome spectacle of Tyburn and the bravery of the Catholic martyrs had on their compatriots.

Even as Campion was being racked and interrogated at the Tower, Philip Howard, 20th Earl of Arundel, was observing Campion’s ordeal and being strengthened in his own faith – and which would lead, in turn, to his death in the Tower.

As Campion stood on the scaffold facing his executioner his blood splattered onto the young Henry Walpole, a graduate of Peterhouse, Cambridge. Walpole was sufficiently inspired to give up his law practice, to become a Catholic, a Jesuit, and in 1595, like Campion, to be hanged drawn and quartered – in his case at York.

What price faith?

In its wider historical context the Tyburn story calls to mind questions of justice: the continuing use today in many jurisdictions of the death penalty; the case for restorative justice; and temptation to incarcerate or execute opponents rather than address the reasons for their dissent.

And beyond the sacrifice, what are the links between the Tyburn tree and events around the world today?

In 2011 speaking in Westminster Hall, where More, Campion and others were tried, Pope Benedict XVI said that “the difficult dilemma which faced More in those difficult times was the perennial question of the relationship between what is owed to Caesar and what is owed to God.”

Benedict said that it had ultimately come down to a question of conscience for the man who asserted he was “the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” Remaining faithful to conscience and faith are not theoretical issues if you live in one of the 16 countries listed last month by the United States Commission on International religious Freedom. In each of these countries people of different faiths – from Baha’is to Sufi Muslims – are being persecuted for their beliefs.

Uniquely, the only group to be persecuted in each and every one of the 16 countries is Christians.

In the 16 countries of Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, North Sudan, Egypt, Eritrea, China, North Korea, Burma, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Turkey and Vietnam some of the most egregious examples of violations of human rights and religious liberties occur. But they are no means alone. The Pugh Foundation says that 70 per cent of the world’s 6.8 billion people face moderate to severe religious persecution. Religious freedom in many countries is a vanishing right and minority faith communities are disappearing with that right. Closer to home, two Scottish midwives were recently told by the courts that they had no right to refuse to take part in the ending of a life of an unborn child though abortion.

What price faith?

What price conscience?

Article 18 of the 1948 United Nations Declaration on Human Rights insisted that “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

Today, Article 18, the right to religious freedom, thought and conscience, is honoured in its breach rather than in its observance. And these violations occur with barely a passing murmur of protest or coverage in our media. Within the last week 21 Christians were killed and 22 wounded in attacks during worship services at a church and university in Northern Nigeria. The north-south conflict is reminiscent of Sudan – when two million, mainly Christian people, were killed, Christian pastors have been beheaded by Boko Haram who openly say their interim goal is “to eradicate Christians from certain parts of the country.”

And now, in Sudan, a new genocidal campaign against Christians has been launched in the Nuba Mountains and South Kordofan by Khartoum’s Sharia regime. The ancient churches in the Middle East have been under unprecedented and relentless escalating attack. I’m often struck by the story of the Palestinian Christian who would reply to the ill-informed question from westerners, “When did your family become Christians?” “About 2,000 years ago”. Pope Benedict has said: “Churches in the Middle East are threatened in their very existence”.

The European Union of Human Rights Organisations says that more than 100,000 Coptic Christians have left Egypt during nine months last year. This quotation is from its director: “Copts are not emigrating voluntarily; they are coerced into that by threats and intimidation of hard-line Salafists, and the lack of protection they are getting from the Egyptian regime.”

The hoped for changes anticipated in the Arab Spring have simply evaporated as liberal and democratic forces have largely been usurped by Salafists and others intent on imposing Sharia law – intolerant of non-adherents.

Think of the execution of Christians in Iran – murdered because they changed their faith. There are now hundreds of thousands of Iranians who have become Christians.

Are they all to be sentenced to death?

In Pakistan, it is just over a year since Shahbaz Bhatti, the country’s courageous Catholic Minister for minorities was murdered. He is fast becoming the unofficial patron saint of religious liberty.

There are just 1.5 million Christians in Pakistan (three per cent of a population of 172 million). Bhatti had attempted to put into practices the principles of the founding father of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who argued for religious toleration and respect. Bhatti said that his stand “would send a message of hope to the people living a life of disappointment, disillusionment and despair” adding that his life was “dedicated to the oppressed, the down trodden and the marginalised” and to “the struggle for human equality, social justice, religious freedom and the empowerment of religious minorities’ communities.”

Following Bhatti’s murder, Pope Benedict prayed that “I ask the Lord Jesus that the moving sacrifice of Shahaz Bhatti may arouse in people’s consciences the courage and commitment to defend religious freedom and human dignity.”

I genuinely am staggered at our indifference to the deaths of men like Shahbaz Bhatti and Iraq’s Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho, whose body was discovered in a shallow grave – one of an estimated 600 Iraqi Christians murdered as their churches have been bombed and desecrated. Hundreds of thousands have fled – many to Syria – where the horror is being played out all over again. Christian sources in Kirkuk say: “The attacks on Christians continue and the world remains totally silent. It’s as if we had been swallowed up by the night”. Remember the admonition of Dr Martin Luther King who said: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends”.

When you think of modern martyrs dying for the faith, think, too, of China and North Korea – a country which I have visited four times and where no priest has been permitted in 60 years. In 1845, St Andrew Kim, the first Korean-born priest aged just 25 was arrested, stripped and decapitated – one of 8000 Korean martyrs. And the suffering continues as we speak.

The United Nations estimate that between 200,000 and 300,000 people are held in gulags and some of you will have seen the recently published harrowing account by Shin Dong Hyok of his “Escape from Camp 14.” Shin, who born in the camp saw his mother and brother executed and he was with me in London two weeks ago. I have spoken in North Korea’s one permitted Catholic Church and seen the resilience of a community outlawed since 1953.

As if to underline the durability of faith when, 60 kilometers north of Pyongyang, I asked if there were any churches in the town of Anju I was told “no, they were destroyed in the war, but the believers meet in the rubble of the Catholic church every week.”

They had been doing that for the past 60 years without priests or sacraments. What price would you attach to faith in those circumstances?

In neighbouring China an estimated 250,000 Christians have been martyred since the Nestorians first introduced the Gospel in the seventh century.

Nine hundred years later Matteus Ricci and the Jesuits endured enormous hardship and risk in the service of the same Gospel.

From the earliest times Christians in the Far East have suffered grievously for their faith. In the 20th century, between 1900 and 2000 more Christians were killed in China than in all the other countries of the world combined.

When I first visited China in 1981 I was taken to a piece of waste land in Shanghai and, as dusk came, at the barred window of a small apartment, the bishop Shanghai appeared and gave a blessing. Bishop Kung spent 30 years in prison or under house arrest. What price can you put on his faith and the endurance of the Catholic community in China?

As real evidence of the truth of Tertullian’s adage that “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church”, it is a fact that, before this 21st century is out, in terms of numbers, more Christians will be living in China than in any other nation.

In considering the plight of Christians in the Far East reflect for a moment on an ancient Chinese story about a man named Bian. He lived around 500 years before Christ.

One day Bian found a large stone. It was actually an unpolished piece of the precious and highly valued stone, jade. Bian was so excited by his discovery that he resolved to present the unpolished stone as a gift to the Emperor of China.

Unfortunately for Bian, when he received it the Emperor saw nothing except a large stone with its rough and disfigured surfaces.

Believing that Bian as trying to make a fool of him the Emperor angrily ordered Bian’s left foot to be amputated.

The Emperor died and Bian tried again – presenting the large stone to the new Emperor. Once again, the potentate reacted angrily, and seeing only the exterior of the unpolished stone, he ordered that Bian’s right foot should also be amputated.

Now a third emperor ascended the throne. The cruelly mutilated Bian asked to be brought to the Palace. For three days and nights he lay outside, clenching the jade in his arms.

This new emperor, exasperated but also intrigued, sent one of his courtiers to investigate and then ordered that the stone be polished to see what it concealed.

This was when they discovered a stunning and beautiful jade hidden beneath the rough and ugly exterior.

It has been suggested that the badly used Bian and his jade is not unlike the grievously misused and persecuted Christian communities of the Far East. After much suffering and the disfigurement of these believers, the beauty of what is concealed is being revealed and at last being valued even in previous atheistic dictatorships. China, especially, with its rampant unfettered materialism replacing the ravages of Maosim desperately needs the Christian church and the hidden beauty represented by Bian and his jade.

The sacrifices which Catholic missionaries made to plant the seeds of faith in these remote and far away places – just like the sacrifices made here at Tyburn – is a direct response to Jesus’ great commission – it gives meaning to the Catholic Church’s central claim – to be universal. And it has always accepted that suffering and martyrdom may be the price which has to be paid. Campion was right when he said that the price had been reckoned and that if the enterprise was of God – Auctore Deo – it would not fail:

“The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God, it cannot be withstood. So the Faith was planted: so it must be restored.”

When I think of the reckoned price of Tyburn and God’s enterprise in our world today, I think of some of the men and women I have met since I helped establish the Jubilee Campaign for religious liberty in the 1980s.

I think of the bishop I met in the Ukraine – Pavlo Vasylk – and Ivan Gel, the lay chairman of the Committee for the defence of the Greek Catholic Church. Between them they had served nearly 40 years of prison sentences.

The bishop’s chaplain had been sent to Chernobyl to clear radioactive waste, without any protective clothing – as a punishment for celebrating the liturgies in the open.

I think of the elderly villager in Nepal who had walked for two weeks to give me his first hand account of how he had been brutally beaten after refusing to renounce his faith; the nun who had been put in the stocks; or the Indian nun in Orissa who was raped in an orgy of violence.

I think of some of the other people and places which I have visited: the bishop in Sudan who showed me what had been his home, church, school and clinic – all obliterated by Sudanese bombers; the great Romanian bishop, Cardinal Todea, who had languished for years in Communist prisons; the Orthodox dissident, Alexander Ogorodnikov, who was kept in solitary confinement in a Soviet jail because he had a organised Christian renewal movement; Lech Walesa and his Polish Solidarity workers, the inspiration of the Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow, the future Pope John Paul II; the Assyrian and Chaldean Catholics hanging on by their fingertips in South East Turkey; and the dignity of the Karen Christian tribes people in Burma; and many others enduring their own versions of Tyburn in this inhospitable world for Christians.

The answer to the question “what price faith?” – the subject of tonight’s lecture – is to be found in these people and in these places. So much of what we take for granted or contemptuously reject they treasure and preserve in their hearts. These are today’s Tyburn martyrs. We must treasure and pass on our own story but never neglect to apply it in our own times too.

In March, and appropriately enough, speaking in Cuba’s Revolution Square Pope Benedict reminded us of two things: First that religious freedom solidifies society: strengthening religious freedom consolidates social bonds, nourishes the hope of a better world, creates favourable conditions for peace and harmonious development, while at the same time establishing solid foundations for securing the rights of future generations.

And secondly that anyone who acts irrationally cannot become a disciple of Jesus. Faith and reason are necessary and complementary in the pursuit of truth. God created man with an innate vocation to the truth and he gave him reason for this purpose. Certainly, it is not irrationality but rather the yearning for truth which the Christian faith promotes.

On the Western wall of Westminster Abbey there are some statues of modern martyrs. First among them is the Franciscan Polish priest, St Maximilian Kolbe In February 1941, when the Nazis promised him that they would permit him to continue his work so long as he made no social comment and did not speak out against them, and so long as he restricted himself to religiosity and pietism, they would leave him alone. He responded by stating in words which sent him to Auschwitz: No one on the world can change truth.

He insisted that when we had found truth we had to serve it because of what use will be the victories on the battlefield if we are defeated in our innermost personal selves?

Kolbe chose the defining battle ground. It is a battle between a religious faith which pits good against evil and truth against lies. And the defence of truth implies sacrifice; it will always require a price to be paid.

Let me end:

Our task must be to assert the importance in all places of rooting religious freedom in the dignity of the human person. The claim for religious freedom is a universal one, securing the freedom of all people of conscience – Christian or not – to embrace the religious belief of their choice.

In turn, the elevation of religious freedom brings great bounty to society in the working out of charitable endeavour and the deepening of the common good. Perhaps – in the context of the challenges to which I have referred – this Government should be seized by this other important reason for promoting freedom of religious belief.

In 1965, the Second Vatican Council, in its great declaration on religious liberty, Dignitatis Humanae, forcefully set out the case for religious freedom. It includes this telling admonition to lawful authorities: “A society which promotes religious freedom will be enlivened and enriched; one that doesn’t will decay”.

As Edmund Campion journeyed from Rome’s Venerable English College he knew what fate awaited him but he loved his country and knew that without its historic faith it would decay.

He came to tell them their nation’s story. And in our own times, and in different ways, the elders must tell the children their story.

More than that, we who have voices must be prepared to use them and our freedoms to speak for those who have none – and who face the ordeal of Tyburn each day of their lives: “In the end” as Dr King said: “we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

Lord Alton of Liverpool

http://www.indcatholicnews.com/news.php?viewStory=20365

From the records of Ashurbanipal, British Museum translation
By the time king Ashurbanipal began his rule in 645 BCE, the neo-Assyrian Empire was on its last legs. Originally a tiny landlocked kingdom in northern Mesopotamia (now Iraq), Assyria expanded to become the greatest empire up to that time. In the space of 300 years starting in 934 BCE, its boundaries grew to encompass modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and much of Egypt, Turkey and Iran. Apart from the odd reference in the Bible (Calhu, for instance, is Assyrian Nimrud), nothing much was known about neo-Assyria until British archeologist Austen Henry Layard began digging near the Iraqi city of Mosul in 1845, leading to the discovery of the great cities of Nimrud and Nineveh.

Ashurbanipal’s North Palace in Nineveh was found and excavated in 1852-54 by Layard’s assistant, Hormuzd Rassam, who followed Layard’s example by having his best discoveries shipped to the British Museum. That’s where you can see what are generally considered to be the finest reliefs, not just of their time, but perhaps of all time: the series comprising the Royal Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal.

The now-extinct Mesopotamian lion – considerably smaller than its African cousin – was once a plague on the human and domestic animal population of Assyria, and a monument from 3000 BCE shows a ruler dutifully protecting his people by killing lions. By the time of Ashurbanipal (685-627 BCE), however, it seems only royalty were allowed to slay them. Perhaps by then lions were rare, although, as indicated by the quote above, a series of good years with ample rain may have boosted their numbers. The king dispatched them ritually and publicly, similar, I suppose, to today’s stylized bullfights. In one scene, we see lions being released, one by one, from their cage into an arena, so the word “hunt” is somewhat of a misnomer. Many reliefs from that time show the king either shooting arrows at the doomed animals from his chariot or impaling them on his spear.

One entire corridor in Ashurbanipal’s Northern Palace, built around 645-635 BCE, was given over to large-scale lion-hunt scenes carved in alabaster bas-relief. Unlike many formalized depictions of animal hunting and sacrifice of that time, what gives these representations their vividness is their realism. I can’t imagine any viewer looking at these animals in their agonized death-throes and not being moved to pity.

Within 20 years of the death of Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian empire had virtually disappeared, victim of an internal power struggle between at least three contenders. The final blow came at the battle of Carcamesh, when the king Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon defeated the remnants of the Assyrian army and their Egyptian allies.

If you’re in London, don’t miss the Royal Lion Hunt reliefs. You’ll re-experience the naturalistic compassion depicted 2,600 years ago by Ashurbanipal’s sensitive sculptor.

http://www.northcoastjournal.com/outdoors/2012/05/10/early-animal-rights-artist/