Detail of slab in room L of Ashurbanipal’s palace: soldiers ripping a foetus out of a pregnant Arab woman, war before 652 BCE [774×457]

Further details of this particularly gruesome exhibition of violence even by Assyrian standards, see Dubovský, 2009: [https://www.jstor.org/stable/43077969](https://www.jstor.org/stable/43077969) He concludes it’s the leg of the foetus being ripped out by the soldier on the left. Other rare examples of women (as opposed to adult men) being killed or laying dead are represented in the bas-reliefs of this campaign.

Compare also with other rare example in written form of Tiglath-Pileser I’s record of his campaigns: “He slit the wombs of the pregnant women, he gouged out the eyes of the infants, he cut the throats of their strong men”

(see also the Bible: 2 Kings 8:12 and 15:16; Amos 1:13)