Nimrud ivories that followed the death of Sargon II in 705 BC or when Nineveh fell and was destroyed in 612 BC. Mallowan's wife was the famous British crime novelist, Agatha Christie (1890–1976), who was fascinated with archaeology, and who accompanied her husband on the Nimrud excavations. Christie helped photograph and preserve many of the ivories found during the excavations, explaining in her autobiography that she cleaned the ivories using a fine knitting needle, an orange stick and a pot of face cream. The collection of ivories uncovered by Mallowan were divided between Iraq and Britain, where they remained at the British
Old Assyrian Empire Assyrian pantheon in Mesopotamian religion, worshipped mainly in Upper Mesopotamia which constituted old Assyria. Ashur was a deified form of the city of Assur, which dates from c. 2600 BC and was the capital city of the Old Assyrian Empire. During the various periods of Assyrian conquest, such as the Upper Mesopotamian Empire of Shamshi-Adad I (c. 1754 BC – c. 1721 BC) Assyrian imperial propaganda proclaimed the supremacy of Ashur and declared that the conquered peoples had been abandoned by their gods. Ashur did not originally have a family, but as the cult came under the influence of Lower