Boris Johnson’s lucky socks: Who is Ashurbanipal, the ‘king of the world’ the Tory leadership hopeful wears for interviews The favourite to become the next Prime Minister has been spotted wearing the British Museum socks on several occasions

Has Boris Johnson got lucky socks? It looks that way, if his choice of footwear for recent campaign events is anything to go by.

His unusual socks, which he wore on Saturday for hustings, on Monday in a BBC interview, and on Tuesday on Talk Radio, feature the image of Ashurbanipal, an Assyrian emperor known variously as “King of the Four Corners of the World” and “King of the Universe”.

The Johnson campaign denied that the potential Prime Minister had been wearing the same pair of socks, telling the Daily Mail’s deputy political editor John Stevens, who first noticed the trend, that he owns “multiple” pairs.

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Has Boris Johnson only got one pair of socks? Pictured at the hustings on Saturday and during today's @talkRADIO interview with the same pair of socks on… both times with one inside out pic.twitter.com/Qy8XLrzfYy — John Stevens (@johnestevens) June 25, 2019

The socks were available for £5.99 from the British Museum’s online shop – but are now sold out.

Mr Johnson is reported to be “living out of a suitcase” after an argument with girlfriend Carrie Symonds in her south London home.

So are British Museum socks simply all he has with him? Or is he trying to send a message?

Who is Ashurbanipal?

Ashurbanipal was a king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 668BC to around 627BC, ruling the largest empire the world had yet seen.

His lands stretched from Cyprus in the Mediterranean to Iran in the east, and from Armenia in the north to the Arabian peninsula and Egypt in the south.

Popular with his people and notoriously cruel to his enemies, Ashurbanipal reigned in the city of Nineveh, now destroyed but located on the outskirts of Mosul in northern Iraq.

He presided over the so-called Library of Ashurbanipal, filled with 30,000 clay tablets, which survived the destruction of his palace and tell us much of what we know about the ancient Mesopotamian world, with everything from astronomical and mathematical texts to contracts and even prayers included.

Despite an expansive, long and successful reign which included the subjugation of everyone from Persians to Egyptians to Israelites to Armenians, Ashurbanipal’s empire fell into decline in his final years as the far-flung colonies lacked financial support and the king struggled to maintain enough troops to govern the “four corners of the world”.

He was succeeded in 627BC by Ashur-etil-ilani – but Assyria’s day had gone, and Persian and Babylonian powers grew to replace it in regional dominance.

Why is Boris Johnson interested?

The prospective Prime Minister is a keen historian, having written a biography of Winston Churchill and a eurosceptic book comparing the European Union unfavourably with ancient Rome’s Pax Romana, among other works.

It is perhaps no surprise that he may have attended the recent BP-sponsored “I am Ashurbanipal, king of the world” exhibition at the British Museum, which ran from November 2018 to February of this year.

The British Museum has many Assyrian artifacts in its permanent collection, in fact, including large statues and wall friezes – but the socks appear to have been produced for the special exhibition, so we can probably assume the former Foreign Secretary visited at that point.

The show-stopper of the British collection is a set of carvings called the Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal, taken from the palace at Nineveh. Across a grand relief – which visitors can walk through in a corridor in the London museum – is depicted a ritualised lion hunt, with the Assyrian king spearing ferocious and realistic big cats accompanied by his court.

Why are these friezes in Britain rather than Iraq? Austen Henry Layard, a British diplomat, took it upon himself to excavate and catalogue the treasures of Nineveh and Nimrud, sending back the majority of the British Museum collection the middle of the 19th century.

It’s not as glamorous as ancient Egyptian art and archaeology, which has benefited from Tutankhamun being sent to New York and the resultant weight of American cultural influence, but the British Museums’ Assyria collection is one of the most important in the world.

What could Ashurbanipal tell us about Boris?

So what can we learn from Johnson’s decision to adorn his ankles with a textile version of a stone carving of a tyrant born 600 years before Julius Caesar?

Is it a threat? A reminder to be ruthless? A statement about who’s in charge? We’re not sure, so we turned to the academics to get their opinion.

“In the British Museum there is a little stone relief depicting Ashurbanipal, the Mighty King, King of Four Quarters, resting in his garden and enjoying a cup of wine,” Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, chair of ancient history at Cardiff University told i.

“It looks idyllic. And then the eye gets drawn to a palm tree in that garden; handing from its boughs is a human head – a grisly victory trophy from Ashurbanipal’s latest campaign.

“If we equate Johnson with that wine-quaffing potentate, then whose is that head? Theresa May? Jeremy Hunt? Gove?

“I’d go for the British public – whom Johnson has hung out to dry.”