In the royal palaces of the Assyrian kings, art served one ultimate purpose – to revere. And not a single square inch was spared.

Take, for example, a bronze band that measures approximately 30 centimeters in width and 185 cm in length. Once attached to the wooden gate of the palace of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III, who reigned between 859 and 824 BC, this decorative piece teems with detail – people and horses, boats and chariots. Together, they tell the story of Assyria’s dominance of Phoenicia, a collection of city-states along the eastern Mediterranean whose strategic coastal location and maritime trading capabilities made it too valuable for the expanding Assyria to ignore.

During much of Assyria’s control of Phoenicia, which spanned from the 9th to the 7th century BC. and involved several military actions and sieges, Phoenician city-states such as Sidon and Tire functioned largely as vassals of the empire, paying regular tributes to avoid destruction. That is the story told by the bronze band, far left, on which a Phoenician king and queen watch, perhaps with a brooding sense of reluctance, as boatloads of valuable local produce are ferried by their men to the mainland. Once there, they are carried in processions by men to King Shalmaneser III, who, standing under an arched parasol, occupies the center left part of the band.

The bronze band, part of the British Museum’s precious Assyrian collection, is on display at the Suzhou Museum in Suzhou city, east China’s Jiangsu province, in the exhibition I Am Ashurbanipal: King of Assyria, which runs until August next year.

“Generally regarded as the last great king of Assyria, Ashurbanipal (669-631 BC) was separated from his ancestor King Shalmaneser III by two centuries, but the latter’s military expansions helped lay the foundation for a mighty empire like the former eventually inherited and brought with it to its peak in the 7th century BC,” says Zhang Fan, the exhibition’s project manager.

According to Zhang, the tribute likely included a labor-intensive purple dye made from the secretions of predatory sea slugs. Made in the port city of Tire in present-day Lebanon, the dye, commonly known as Tyrian purple, may have given the country Phoenicia its name – in ancient Greek, the word phoinix may mean purple.

Other highly prized tributary objects that had arrived in the Assyrian palaces from Phoenicia were ivory carvings and colored glass made by Phoenician artisans who were known to combine multiple cultural influences—Egyptian style, for example—in their creations.

Examples of both can be seen at the Suzhou Museum, along with a shell cosmetic container also attributed to Phoenician craftsmen whose design features a winged siren with a head carved from the hinge of the shell.

“The expansion of the Assyrian Empire revived the manufacture and trade of luxury goods. It also led to the exchange of visual culture, technology, people and ideas across the ancient Mediterranean and the Middle East,” the exhibition’s catalog states.

One place to observe such an exchange was at the king’s banquet, where tableware decorated with motifs from all over the kingdom can be found. Even the large amount of food and drink served was recorded in texts describing their place of origin as associated with particular products of exceptional quality.

Despite the immense pain they inflicted on the conquered people, Assyrians, eager adapters and adopters, essential to cross-cultural pollination, their influence was far more far-reaching than the Assyrian kings ever imagined.

One of the recurring images in the Suzhou Museum’s exhibit is the lotus flower, which entered the outer border of a carved stone slab that once served as the threshold of Ashurbanipal’s throne room at his North Place at Nineveh in present-day Mosul, Iraq. Directly associated with Assyrian kingship, the lotus also made a famous appearance on a large stone relief depicting a banquet presided over by Ashurbanipal and his queen Libbali-sharrat. Reclining on a couch, the king holds a cup in his right hand and a lotus flower in his left.

“Although its origins and transmissions are difficult to trace with any certainty, the lotus flower motif was part of an iconographic tradition shared and reimagined across the Middle East, Egypt, the Mediterranean and Asia,” said Sebastien Rey, Curator for Great Britain. Museum behind the current exhibition.

The stone slab with lotus flowers on its outer border also has an inner border consisting of rosettes, a decorative design resembling the shape of a rose. According to Rey, the rosette is often associated with the great Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar who was worshiped by the Assyrians. Being a warrior goddess whose protection Assyrian kings had sought before going into battle, Ishtar also represented love, beauty and fertility. This dual nature could have held a mirror to Ashurbanipal who, judging by all the evidence, constituted a complex and multifaceted personality.

Part of the exhibit is called The Scholar King, for good reason. “Unlike his predecessors, Ashurbanipal mastered the scribe and was able to solve complex mathematical problems and debate with expert scholars,” says Zhang.

Taking great pride in these academic achievements, the king created in his capital Nineveh the largest and most comprehensive library the world had ever seen before filling it with inscribed clay tablets.

While many carried divination texts, others were given to the recording of Mesopotamian literature, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, the earliest version of which dates back to around 2100 BC.

Noted for its complex narrative structure, poetic language, and exploration of universal themes such as friendship and loss, the epic is considered a foundational work in the tradition of heroic tales, with Gilgamesh providing the prototype for later heroes such as Heracles and the epic itself serving as an influence on Homeric epic.

A broken piece of clay bearing part of the epic story in cuneiform has arrived at the ongoing exhibition from the British Museum, which had earlier sent its own team of conservators and technicians to install all the exhibits. After the initial installation, this particular piece, which was dated to a time period between 680 and 630 BC, was moved when a visitor noted that its orientation did not make it easy to read.

That level of audience involvement could have given Ashurbanipal great satisfaction, whose immense pride and desire for a lasting legacy matched the size of his empire.