Ashurnasirpal II was not a nice person

"When Layard roamed through the twenty-eight royal halls and chambers of his unearthed Nimrud... he still did not know the identity of the Assyrian king whose capital this was... Had Layard only been able to read the accompanying inscriptions he would have learned firsthand the brutal sadism of Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 B.C.):

“I built a pillar over against his city gate, and I flayed all the chief men who had revolted, and I covered the pillar with their skins; some I walled up within the pillar, some I impaled upon the pillar on stakes, . . . and I cut off the limbs of the officers, of the royal officers who had rebelled. . . . 

Many captives from among them I burned with fire, and many I took as living captives. From some I cut off their hands and their fingers, and from others I cut off their noses, their ears, and their fingers(?), of many I put out the eyes. I made one pillar of the living, and another of heads, and I bound their heads to posts (tree trunks) round about the city. Their young men and maidens I burned in the fire . . . 

Twenty men I captured alive and I immured them in the wall of his palace. . . . The rest of them [their warriors] I consumed with thirst in the desert of the Euphrates.”​

—Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia, by D. D. Luckenbill, 1926.

Cited by Ryan and Pitman in Noah's Flood.