Layard Excavates Nineveh
Between 1845 and 1851, the English adventurer and diplomat Austen Henry Layard led excavations at the Assyrian sites of Nimrud and Nineveh in northern Iraq. His work brought to light monumental palaces, miles of carved stone reliefs, and, at Nineveh, a vast collection of cuneiform tablets known as the library of Ashurbanipal. These discoveries revealed a great ancient empire that most Europeans knew only from the Bible and a few classical writers, and they helped found the modern study of Mesopotamian history.
Assyria had dominated the Near East in the first millennium BC, and its capital Nineveh, on the Tigris opposite modern Mosul, fell in 612 BC to a coalition of Babylonians and Medes. The city then faded from view, and its ruins were covered by mounds that locals knew as Kuyunjik and Nebi Yunus. In the 1840s European interest in the region was rising. The French consul Paul-Émile Botta had begun digging near Mosul in 1842 and found the palace at Khorsabad, which spurred Layard, who had travelled widely in the Ottoman world, to try his own luck.
Layard began at Nimrud in 1845, with financial support from the British ambassador Stratford Canning, and later turned to Nineveh. There his team uncovered the great palace of Sennacherib, with long corridors lined with alabaster slabs showing battles, sieges, hunting scenes, and the transport of colossal winged bulls. Layard worked chiefly by tunnelling along walls, a method that found sculpture quickly but destroyed much context. His assistant Hormuzd Rassam, a local Christian, played an important role, and Rassam later led digs of his own. Layard also published popular accounts that made him famous.
The tablet libraries were found in the Nineveh palaces, with the best-known material coming from the collection assembled by Ashurbanipal in the seventh century BC. Layard's team recovered many tablets, and Rassam and others added more in later years. Tens of thousands of fragments eventually reached the British Museum, along with the great sculptures. Among them were literary, scholarly, and religious texts, including versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The consequences were far-reaching. Scholars were still learning to read cuneiform, and the new material gave them the raw data to do so. In the 1870s George Smith's translation of a flood story from the tablets caused a public sensation because of its parallels with the Genesis account. Assyrian reliefs went on display in London and Paris, shaping Western ideas about the ancient East. The excavations also set precedents, good and bad, for archaeology: they showed the value of large-scale fieldwork, but also the dangers of rapid, poorly documented digging and of removing heritage from its country of origin, debates that remain live today.