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BRITISH MUSEUM/SCALA, FLORENCE
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The art of public relations might seem modern, but PR campaigns are found all over history. Look back a few centuries when “L’Etat, c’est moi,” a perfect slogan attributed to King Louis XIV, tells France exactly who was in charge (it was the king). Go back more than a thousand years and Augustus Caesar, first emperor of Rome, is putting his face on everything across the Roman world—coins, marble statues, even silverware!
In the 600s B.C., inscriptions on palace walls loudly declared Assyria's Ashurbanipal (pictured above using a bow to hunt lions from his chariot in a seventh-century B.C. relief) the undisputed “King of the World.” But there was more than braggadocio to the king’s messaging—it helped keep his empire together, including the city of Nineveh (depicted below as it may have appeared in seventh century B.C.). “The late Assyrian Empire was tumultuous, violent, and even brutal,” reports Nat Geo's History magazine. Not only did the king have to be the best, he had to constantly remind his subjects that he was the best.
Find out whether Ashurbanipal's messaging campaign worked.
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