In the recent K-19 thread there is an article linked in this comment about the disaster. One of the Soviet sailors, Nikolai Cherkashin, is quoted as saying, "As in ancient Assyria, where a ship's path to the water was slickened with the sacrificial blood of slaves, the launching ramp of the K-19 ran with human blood."
Did Assyrians regularly sacrifice slaves? Did they do it every time a new boat was built? It just seems like a terrible waste of manpower and a terrible way to build a navy.
I am not aware of any sort of mass human sacrifice in Assyria, certainly none was conducted as part of the shipbuilding process. While of course it is impossible to prove a negative, quite a few letters have survived concerning shipbuilding as part of the imperial administrative correspondence and they say nothing about human sacrifice or the need thereof; in fact most of the correspondence is relatively mundane complaints about needing more workers or materials or being defensive about how much or little work was getting done. Human sacrifice is generally very rarely attested in the ancient Near East; probably the best-known example is the retainer sacrifice in the royal cemetery at Ur and other archaeologically attested examples(the "Death Pit" at Domuztepe) mostly predate the Neo-Assyrian Empire significantly and seem to be more visible in Syria and Anatolia. The one form of ritual killing that is reasonably well attested in Assyria is the "substitute king" ritual, but that is a very different affair. It sounds like the Soviet sailor quoted is simply resurrecting the longstanding and dubious trope of Assyria as the prototypical evil and bloodthirsty empire to create a colorful metaphor for the K-19's tremendous cost in human lives.