Large pieces of a monumental relief have been discovered in the palace of King Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, the ancient capital of the Assyrian Empire, near modern-day Mosul, Iraq. Dating to the around 645-635 B.C., the relief depicts the king and two major deities accompanied by other unidentified figures. The find is unprecedented both for its massive size and for the gods it depicts. No other depictions of the high deities Ashur and Ishtar have been found in any Assyrian palaces.The team of archaeologists from Heidelberg University found the relief fragments in the throne room of the kings northern palace. It was carved onto a stone slab 5.5 meters (18 feet) long and three meters (9.8 feet) high weighing 12 tons.At the center of the newly discovered relief is a depiction of King Ashurbanipal, the last great ruler of the Assyrian Empire. He is flanked by two high deities: the god Ashur and the city goddess of Nineveh, Ishtar. Behind each of these are a fish genius, who grants salvation and life to the gods and the ruler, as well as a supporting figure with raised arms; this figure can probably be reconstructed as a scorpion-man. These figures suggest that a giant winged sun disk was originally placed above the relief, explains [excavation leader] Aaron Schmitt.Archaeologists estimate the palaces in Nineveh contained a jaw-dropping 10 miles of wall reliefs. The northern palace was destroyed in 612 B.C., leaving all those wall reliefs in pieces. When British archaeologists excavated it in the mid-19th century, they recovered pieces of large-scale reliefs that are now in the British Museum. The low-relief carvings include lion hunts, battles, banquets, diplomatic, ritual and domestic scenes with the king as protagonist.According to Prof. Schmitt, the relief originally stood in a wall niche opposite the main entrance to the throne room, i.e., in the most important location in the palace. The Heidelberg researchers discovered the relief fragments in an earth-filled pit behind this niche. It was probably created in the Hellenistic period, in the third or second century BC. The fact that the fragments were buried is certainly one of the reasons why the British archaeologists did not find them a little over a hundred years ago, Prof. Schmitt suspects. In consultation with the State Antiquities Authority of Iraq (SBAH), there are plans to return the relief to its original location in the medium term and make it accessible to the public.