No battlefield is a pleasant place after the action has ceased, but should they choose, the victors can certainly extend the horror to those that have survived, and the Assyrians knew just how to do it. To quote just one text, referring to the capture of the rebel city of Suru in 883 BCE, King Ashurnasirpal II (ruled 883 to 859 BCE) described what he did next:

“I built a pillar over against the city gate and I flayed all the chiefs who had revolted and I covered the pillar with their skins. Some I impaled upon the pillar on stakes and others I bound to stakes round the pillar….From some I cut off their noses, their ears, and their fingers, of many I put out their eyes. I made one pillar of the living and another of heads and I bound their heads to tree trunks round about the city.”

This was far from a unique event, and there are many Assyrian texts and bas-reliefs that speak of beheading, impalement and many other horrors. It must also be remembered that the Assyrians were far from the only ones to act in this way, but they were certainly not reticent about trumpeting their actions – indeed the whole point was to stop others from contemplating similar rebellion through fear of the consequences, although the history of the Neo-Assyrian Empire is littered with revolts, so clearly such terror was no guarantee of submission. Historical miniatures tend to focus on the battle itself, or sometimes the lead up to one, but rarely do they depict the aftermath. With this set Linear-A have been characteristically uncompromising in depicting some of these horrors.

Enslavement was, of course, a very common fate for soldiers and civilians on the losing side, and the Assyrians were also well-known for relocating large numbers of people away from their homeland, but the first piece pictured above is something more severe. It shows two naked men with their arms bound behind their backs and their hands bound in front, perhaps being moved toward a life of slavery. Logically they would be bound to the pole that joins them, but there is no sign of any such attachment on the model. Also, the front man seems to be walking while the other is more running, which seems a bit odd as they can only both be travelling at the same speed. However, compared to some, these are the lucky ones in this set.

Next is an Assyrian soldier manhandling a naked woman. She has her hands bound behind her back, and it is all too easy to imagine her fate as ‘spoils of war’.

The last figure in the top row is of an Assyrian soldier standing and grasping a severed head. Beheading enemies was not uncommon in the ancient world, and the Assyrians used enemy heads as trophies (such as the piles of heads mentioned above) and as a means of counting the victims of their actions. Anyone who brought back many heads for the scribes to count might expect both praise and reward. Leaving little to the imagination, the next figure is another soldier in the act of decapitating an enemy, whom we might hope was dead before that operation began – he certainly is now. The soldier is using a long sword to do his work, which strikes us as a less than ideal tool for the job (though we cannot speak from experience). The traditional Assyrian short sword, or a good-sized dagger, might have been better, but perhaps the long sword was all that was to hand, though it is thought that such weapons were mainly carried by wealthier and higher ranking soldiers.

Last in our gallery of horrors is a man impaled on a long pole and held upright by two soldiers. Impalement was often depicted or mentioned at the time, and there are several ways of doing it, some of which allow the victim to still be alive, and so suffer unimaginable agonies as he slowly expires. In this case, however, we can be confident that the victim is dead as he has been impaled with the spear through the middle of his abdomen and out behind the neck. While that may be a small mercy, it is still a terrible sight, and sometimes the Assyrians impaled living prisoners near to the walls of some town which was refusing to surrender to them. Doubtless the defenders got the point, although whether this encouraged a surrender is a matter for debate.

Once you get over the honest brutality of the subject matter, the first thing that strikes you about this set is just how beautifully (if that is the right word) it is made. 3D printed, each of the five pieces pictured above come complete, with no assembly of any kind, which would be impossible with more traditional methods of production. The proportions and animation of these figures is perfect, once again illustrated what can be achieved with this technology, and everything about them is natural and lifelike. Detail is of course exceptional, despite the complex clothing and armour they wear, and with no mould line or flash they are all ready to go straight out of the box. As we have come to expect from Linear-A, this is very impressive quality.

Although the set speaks of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in general (911 to 609 BCE), we can highlight some details of costume that date these figures more tightly. Apart from the two holding up the impaled man, the Assyrian soldiers here are fairly similar, all having the classic Assyrian conical helmet and lamellar armour corselet over the fringed tunic or kilt. One wears a characteristic wide belt, but what dates these three is the long lace-up boots they all wear, which appeared late in the 8th century and persisted until the empire’s fall in the late 7th. The two men in the last piece are different in that they have the small metal disc (irtu) strapped to their chest rather than a corselet, and another on the back (which seems odd to us, but at least one modern source says this is correct). They also both have a curved crest on their helmets, indicative of Neo-Hittite troops, although this was later also adopted by some Assyrians, and again the dating is late 8th century or after. These two men have no visible weapons, and the long swords of the others have already been mentioned.

This is certainly not your average set of soldiers. It shines a spotlight on an aspect of warfare that some might prefer not to dwell on, although there would be many voices in the ancient world, victims of the Assyrians, who would applaud this portrayal. The Assyrian kings claimed they were acting on behalf of the gods, punishing people who had broken an oath to them, which permitted any form of extreme punishment, although historians have wondered if some did not also actually enjoy the work in a sadistic way. Regardless of the horrors modelled, these are fantastic figures expertly produced and historically authentic, and given the sheer number of campaigns undertaken by the Assyrians in the last century or so of their empire, sights such as these must have been all too common in sacked towns across the region.