Is the British Museum afraid of an ancient Assyrian curse?

Surely not. The famous Bloomsbury museum possesses many spooky treasures that it displays without so much as a shudder. Its collection of Egyptian mummies is the stuff of Hammer horror. It possesses the magical accessories of the Elizabethan magus John Dee and a bronze Mesopotamian demon that fans of The Exorcist will have no trouble recognising as Pazuzu. Yet it is apparently unlikely to place a bid at Bonhams in London on 3 April for a fragment of an Assyrian stele that carries a curse written in cuneiform, even though it owns the other part of the relic.

I'm not sure the cuneiform curse – which says that anyone who removes it from its original site will come to a sticky end – has put off the British Museum. It may also figure it has enough Assyrian art already.

This ancient empire, which once ruled a vast swathe of the Middle East, looms large in the museum's collections. Giant winged bulls, bronze gates and epic relief carvings of battles, sieges, mass executions and lion hunts, all excavated from the royal palaces of the Assyrian rulers, are installed on an architectural scale between its Egyptian monuments and its Greek temple treasures.

British Museum's Assyrian winged bulls are reportedly some of the heaviest items in its collections. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

Assyrian art is monstrously impressive. The empire was cruel and savage, and its art chronicles its brutal ways with unblushing honesty. The reliefs in the British Museum depict prisoners being tortured and killed on an industrial scale. For fun, the emperors are shown killing lions at close quarters with arrows. Even the style of its art is fearsome and unforgiving: Its harsh muscular lines intentionally communicate power without mercy.

It is scarcely surprising, then, that such a fierce culture was free with its curses. Actually, the curse on the stele strikes me as quite an exciting text by the standards of the Assyrian empire. Most of the palace reliefs in the British Museum are inscribed with repetitive, relentless boasts about the Assyrian ruler's authority and might. A curse sounds like light relief.

The hybrid monsters that once guarded such palace gateways loom up, magical and inhuman. Assyrian art is certainly awe-inspiring – but perhaps not civilised. I admire their art but cannot look at it for long. If I pass from the British Museum's Assyrian galleries to the graceful grandeur of ancient Egypt or the Greek gods exhibited nearby, I sense a greater human richness. Egypt and Greece were civilisations. Assyria was not.

Perhaps Assyrian art is indeed "cursed" by the blood and gore it celebrates. I am sure the British Museum does not believe in ancient words of magical menace. But Assyrian art itself casts an evil spell.