This volume is the catalogue of the homonymous exhibition, hosted at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples from 3 July to 16 September 2019. The exhibition, which draws on important loans from museums around the world, stems from the presence in the museum’s deposits of 15 casts of the reliefs that decorated the buildings of the ancient Assyrian capitals, Nimrud and Nineveh, whose originals are in the British Museum, London. As the curator Simonetta Graziani illustrates in her essay, the study of these casts and the circumstances of their arrival at the MANN, in 1866, highlighted the part played by Neapolitan scholars in the 19th century in enhancing archaeological discoveries related to the Assyrian and Egyptian civilizations, as well as the significant international relations in the scientific field that were also based on the rediscovery, less than a century earlier, of Pompeii. The numerous essays present in the catalogue are an opportunity to make the public aware of the great importance of Assyrian civilization, its way of life, the splendour of its art and the importance of writing, the figure of the king, the laws and the state organization that were the source of its predominance over the peoples of the Near East.