A photo is being shared on social media claiming it as the 5000-year-old representation of an ancient Indian while swimming with a life tank in water. Let’s verify the claims made in the post.

The archived version of the post can be seen here.

Claim: 5000-year-old picture of ancient Indian swimming with a life tank.

Fact: The sculpture photo shared in the post is an Assyrian art painted during 865 BC – 860 BC. This sculpture is at least 2,900 years old and has nothing to do with India. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.

On reverse image search of the photo shared in the post, a similar photo was found in a tweet posted by a user on Twitter. In the tweet, he mentioned it as the picture of an Assyrian soldier swimming across the river using inflated animal skin as a buoyancy aid. When we searched for more reliable sources using these keywords, we found that the same sculpture photo exists in the British Museum. The British Museum website mentioned this photo as the Assyrian art painted during 865 BC – 860 BC. So, this sculpture is at least 2,900 years old and has nothing to do with India.

We can find information about this sculpture in the ‘The Ancient Assyrians’ book.

According to ancient texts, the Assyrian empire lived in the Middle-East area of Levant.

To sum it up, the sculpture photo shared in the post is at least 2,900 years old and has nothing to relate with India.