Discoveries Among the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon

by Austen Henry Layard

To the north of the Dujail we wound through a perfect maze of ancient canals now dry. It required the practised eye of the Bedouin to follow the sand-covered track. About eight miles beyond the bridge the embankments suddenly ceased. A high rampart of earth then stretched as far as the eye could see, to the right and to the left. At certain distances were mounds, forming square inclosures, like ruined outworks. A few hundred yards in advance was a second rampart, much lower and narrower than the first. We had reached what some believe to be the famous Median wall, one of the many wonders of Babylonia, built by the Babylonians from river to river across Mesopotamia, to guard their wealthy city and thickly peopled provinces against invasion from the north. Captain Jones, however, who has examined these remains with more care and for a greater distance than any other traveller, or than I could do during a hasty journey, is of opinion that they are not those of a wall of defence, but merely of an embankment, stretching for miles inland, and originally raised to protect the lower country from inundations, and to regulate its irrigation. I confess that my own impression, even after this explanation, was in favor of the rampart. At any rate, if this be not the Median wall, no traces of which have been as yet found in any other part of Mesopotamia, it appeared to me to be a regular line of fortification. It is called by the Arabs, at the place we crossed it, Farriyah; elsewhere, the Sidr al Nimroud, or the rampart of Nimrod.

Beyond the Median wall we entered upon undulating gravelly downs, furrowed by deep ravines, and occasionally rising into low hills. With the rich alluvial soil of Babylonia, we had left the boundaries of the ancient province. The banks of the Tigris are here, in general, too high, and the face of the country too unequal, to admit of artificial irrigation being carried far inland by watercourses derived from the river.

The spiral tower, the dome, and the minarets of Samarrah at length appeared above the eastern horizon, and we rode towards them. After nine hours and a half’s journey we encamped for the night on the Tigris opposite to the town. As the sun went down we watched the women who, on the other side of the river, came to fetch their evening supplies of water, and gracefully bearing their pitchers on their heads returned to the gates. But on our bank the solitude was only broken by a lonely hyæna coming to drink at the stream, and the hungry jackals that prowled round our tents. The ruins of an early Arab town, called Ashik, stood on a hill in the distance, and near our camping place were the deserted walls of a more recent settlement.

On the third day of our journey another ride of nine hours and a half, along the banks of the Tigris, brought us to Tekrit. The Arabs were keeping the small town of Tekrit in a state of siege, and its supplies having been cut off, we had some difficulty in getting provisions for ourselves and our horses. We were not sorry to leave Tekrit, whose inhabitants did not belie a notoriously bad character. Next morning we struck inland, in order to avoid the precipitous hills of Makhoul, at whose very feet sweeps the Tigris. They form part of a long isolated limestone range which commences with the Sinjar, runs through the centre of Mesopotamia, crosses the river near Khan Karnaineh, then takes the name of Hamrin, and approaching the mountains of Luristan continues parallel with them to the Persian province of Fars. In the Makhoul hills are several ruins. Some falling walls and towers hanging over the Tigris, and once, probably, the stronghold of a freebooter, who levied blackmail on travellers, are called by the Arabs the “Castle of the Giants,” and are said to be the dwelling-place of jins and various other supernatural beings.

Our track led through a perfect wilderness. We found no water, nor saw any moving thing. When, after a long ride of about eleven hours, we reached some brackish springs, called Belaliss, the complete solitude lulled us into a feeling of security, and we all slept without keeping the accustomed watch. I was awoke in the middle of the night by an unusual noise close to my tent. I immediately gave the alarm, but it was too late. Two of our horses had been stolen, and in the darkness we could not pursue the thieves. Sahiman broke out in reproaches of himself as the cause of our mishap, and wandered about until dawn in search of some clue to the authors of the theft. At length he tracked them, declared unhesitatingly that they were of the Shammar, pointed out, from marks almost imperceptible to any eye but to that of a Bedouin, that they were four in number, had left their delouls at some distance from our tents, and had already journeyed far before they had been drawn by our fires to the encampment. These indications were enough. He swore an oath that he would follow and bring back our stolen horses wherever they might be, for it was a shame upon him and his tribe that, whilst under his protection in the Desert, we had lost anything belonging to us. And he religiously kept his oath. When we parted at the end of our journey, he began at once to trace the animals. After six weeks’ search, during which he went as far as Ana on the Euphrates, where one had been sold to an Arab of the town, he brought them to Mosul. I was away at the time, but he left them with Mr. Rassam, and returned to the Desert without asking a reward for performing an act of duty imperative on a Bedouin. Such instances of honesty and good faith are not uncommon amongst the wandering Arabs, as I can bear witness, from personal experience.

Mr. Rassam frequently sent Suttum across the Desert with as much as five or six hundred pounds in money, and always with the most complete confidence. His only reward was an occasional silk dress, or one or two camel loads of corn for his family, the whole of the value of a few shillings.[232] Of late years the wool of the Bedouin sheep has been in considerable demand in the European markets, and a large trade in this article has already been opened with the Shammar. Money is generally advanced some months before the sheep are sheared, to enable the Arabs to buy their winter stock of provisions. Mr. Rassam has thus paid beforehand several thousand pounds without any written or other guarantee whatever. The tribes leave the neighbourhood of the town, and are not again heard of until their long strings of camels are seen bringing the promised wool. I remember a Bedouin coming all the way alone from the neighbourhood of Baghdad to pay Mr. Rassam a trifling sum, I think between three and four shillings, the balance of a wool account between them.

A youth of the great tribe of the Aneyza having quarrelled with his parents, ran away and came to Mosul, when he entered as a student in a college. He became a Mullah, and had almost forgotten his early friends, when the tribe, driven by a famine from the Syrian desert, crossed the Euphrates, and encamped near the town to buy corn. Ibn Gayshish, their Sheikh, hearing by chance that the fugitive was still alive, and now a member of the priesthood, sent a messenger to him to say, that since he had quitted his tents his father had died, and had left a certain number of camels, which had been divided according to the law amongst his family. Those allotted to him had been in the safe keeping of the tribe, and had increased yearly. The chief was now ready to do with them as their rightful owner might direct.

Mr. Rassam had, at my request, sent a party of Jebours to renew the excavations at Kalah Sherghat, which had been very imperfectly examined. The springs of Belaliss are separated from the shoulder of the Gebel Makhoul, which overhangs the ruins, by a wild rocky valley, called Wadi Jehannem, the Valley of Hell. We crossed it and the hills in about three hours and a half, and came suddenly upon the workmen, who, of course, took us for Bedouin plunderers, and prepared to defend themselves. They had opened trenches in various parts of the great mound, but had made no discoveries of any importance, and I am inclined to doubt whether an edifice containing any number of sculptures or inscriptions ever existed on the platform. Fragments of a winged bull in the alabaster of the Nineveh palaces, part of a statue in black stone with a few cuneiform characters, and pieces of a large inscribed slab of copper, were found in the ruins; I collected also the fragments of a large inscribed cylinder in baked clay[233], and a copper cup, a few vases in common pottery, and some beads.

We encamped in the jungle to the north of the ruins, and were visited by fifteen men of the Albou Mohammed, who frankly confessed that they were thieves, out on their vocation. As the tribe does not bear a very good character for honesty, and as it might have struck our guests that they had no need of going further to fulfil the object of their journey, we violated the duties of hospitality, and put some of them in irons for the night, as a guarantee for the good conduct of the rest.

I ordered the Jebours to leave Kalah Sherghat, and to return with us to Mosul, which we reached the following day. Mr. Bell, who had been sent to Assyria by the Trustees of the British Museum to succeed Mr. Cooper as artist to the expedition, had arrived in the town two days before. I rode with him without delay to Kouyunjik, to examine the excavations made during my absence. I will now describe the sculptures uncovered whilst I was at Baghdad and after my return to Mosul, previous to my departure for England.