They gathered in the same body the strength of a bull, the freedom of an eagle and the intelligence of a human being . The Lamassu , the colossal statues of winged bulls, were icons of Assyrian civilization and for centuries escorted access to their royal palaces. The destruction that five years ago unleashed the hosts of the caliphate stripped Iraq of its last specimens. A warped and modeled project in Madrid now presumes to combat the recklessness that terrorists and plunders spread.

The miracle of resuscitating a couple from Lamassu has been done in the workshops of Factum Arte, the company that signed seven years ago the replica of the tomb of Tutankhamen open to the public on the road that leads to the original burial in the Valley of the Kings , in the Egyptian city of Luxor . "The project was born in 2004 when we digitized two statues exhibited in the British Museum," Nicolas Beliard, one of the souls of a project that has just landed on Mesopotamian land, tells EL MUNDO.

The reproductions, created and assembled on the Plateau that should have been exhibited in Iraq in 2005, have now led the way to their homeland. Awake, the Lamassu have traveled from the base of Torrejón de Ardoz to the Baghdad military airport . "They arrived in two planes of the army of the air. They are in a hangar of the military airport of Baghdad, waiting to be transferred to Mosul through Erbil," Juan José Escobar, Spanish ambassador to Iraq, tells this newspaper.

Two soldiers of the Spanish Army accommodate the aftershocks on the plane that has moved them from Spain to Iraq.

An act planned for later this month -if security conditions permit- will serve for its presentation in society in which it was the capital of the caliphate, which has been trying for two years to heal the wounds that the extremists gave to their street. The five-legged figures will flank thereafter access to a student building at the University of Mosul , in full restoration campaign of its punished campus.

The sculptures adorned the throne room of the Assyrian Assurnasirpal II monarch's palace (883-959 BC) in Nimrud, for 150 years, capital of an Assyrian empire that extended from Lower Egypt to Iran. The archaeological site, located on the banks of the Tigris, was subjected in 2015 to a thorough campaign of destruction at the hands of the jihadist organization. A video showed its militants assaulting the colossi with hammers. The bearded men were also primed with Nergal's door where another Lamassu couple resided.

A decade before his last vestiges succumbed to barbarism, Factum Arte had access to the Lamassu included in the collection of the British Museum , sent to London between 1848 and 1849 by archaeologist Austin Henry Layard after remaining two millennia underground. A team of high resolution white light scanners, manufactured in Barcelona, ​​sponsored and recorded the skin of the figures. "Between the digitization that was done in 2004 and what could be done now, progress is minimal," Beliard said.

Parts of a replica, in the Madrid workshop where they were created. José Pereira

"The facsimile is identical to the original both on the surface and in the color . Color tests were made from pigments and a stucco marble mold was used to reach the precision we have," says the expert. Years later, the information gathered served to forge the copies, made in stucco and coated with wax. They were illuminated in the facilities of Factum Arte in the popular district of San Blas-Canillejas , "a space of 5,000 square meters very close to the center of Madrid where 50 people with very different profiles work, from architects to painters, conservators or engineers ".

Its impressive result was unveiled for the first time in 2016 within the framework of the "Nineveh" exhibition at the National Museum of Antiquities of Leiden (Holland). The British accepted with the only condition that, after the exhibition, the pieces were destined for Mosul, recovered in 2017 by security forces after nine months of fierce battle.

During the last year, the workshop founded by the Englishman Adam Lowe has struggled to achieve the challenge of bequeathing the clones of the Lamassu of Nimrud to the city of Mosul in a sort of historical repair. "Daesh [Islamic State, for its acronym in Arabic] destroyed two fundamental icons of Assyrian culture such as the Asurbanipal Library at the University of Mosul and the archaeological site of Nimrud. He did it in an iconoclastic way, with a video in which proclaimed the end of pre-Islamic history. Our initiative is a reaction to that attack and a sign of support for Mosul, "Escobar slips.

Winged bulls rebuilt by the grace of new technologies will be located not far from the building that houses the Asurbanipal Library project, on the university campus of the second city of Iraq. The initiative seeks to recover the legacy of the largest living royal library on the planet , in which British archaeologists found more than 30,000 cuneiform tablets. A fascinating compendium of legal, administrative, medical, literary or magical texts.

"Daesh burned it and took a good part of the tablets. The return of the Lamassu also marks the beginning of the museum's reconstruction process through digital media, " says the ambassador. Factum Arte aims to train students and professionals in archeology in the digitization of Iraqi heritage, an adventure similar to the one launched a few years ago in the land of the pharaohs. "The return of the statues is the beginning of a new and positive relationship with Europe in which technology and the transfer of equipment and skills demonstrate that cultural heritage can lead to deeper understanding," Lowe predicts.

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