A closer look
Why bother fighting a costly foreign war when you can just violently slaughter captive zoo animals to prove a geopolitical point? King Ashurbanipal of Assyria didn’t just like hunting; he used it as highly choreographed state terrorism. Captured Asiatic lions were released from wooden cages into enclosed arenas just so the king could publicly shoot them full of arrows in front of visiting foreign dignitaries. To make sure absolutely nobody forgot this majestic flex, he covered his palace walls with hyper-realistic carvings of the dying lions. It was the ancient Mesopotamian equivalent of maintaining aggressive eye contact while crushing a beer can against your forehead.
